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Related papers: Causal Mediation Analysis with Hidden Confounders

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Causal mediation analysis aims at disentangling a treatment effect into an indirect mechanism operating through an intermediate outcome or mediator, as well as the direct effect of the treatment on the outcome of interest. However, the…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-05 Martin Huber , Lukáš Lafférs

Traditional recommender systems aim to estimate a user's rating to an item based on observed ratings from the population. As with all observational studies, hidden confounders, which are factors that affect both item exposures and user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yaochen Zhu , Jing Yi , Jiayi Xie , Zhenzhong Chen

Causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into a portion operating through a hypothesized mediator and a residual direct portion. Identification of natural direct and indirect effects typically rests on the mediator…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Yuki Ohnishi , Fan Li

Proximal causal inference is a recently proposed framework for evaluating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For point identification of causal effects, it leverages a pair of so-called treatment and outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-04-24 Priyantha Wijayatunga

Researchers are often interested in learning not only the effect of treatments on outcomes, but also the pathways through which these effects operate. A mediator is a variable that is affected by treatment and subsequently affects outcome.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-22 Jeremiah Jones , Ashkan Ertefaie , Robert L. Strawderman

Many real-world decision-making tasks require learning causal relationships between a set of variables. Traditional causal discovery methods, however, require that all variables are observed, which is often not feasible in practical…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-27 Raj Agrawal , Chandler Squires , Neha Prasad , Caroline Uhler

Proximal causal inference (PCI) has emerged as a promising framework for identifying and estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. While many traditional causal inference methods rely on the assumption of no…

The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Antonio Olivas-Martinez , Peter B. Gilbert , Andrea Rotnitzky

This paper provides robust estimators and efficient inference of causal effects involving multiple interacting mediators. Most existing works either impose a linear model assumption among the mediators or are restricted to handle…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-12 Haoyu Wei , Hengrui Cai , Chengchun Shi , Rui Song

Estimating the effect of intervention from observational data while accounting for confounding variables is a key task in causal inference. Oftentimes, the confounders are unobserved, but we have access to large amounts of additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Shachi Deshpande , Kaiwen Wang , Dhruv Sreenivas , Zheng Li , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Mediation analyses play important roles in making causal inference in biomedical research to examine causal pathways that may be mediated by one or more intermediate variables (i.e., mediators). Although mediation frameworks have been well…

Applications · Statistics 2023-01-25 Meilin Jiang , Seonjoo Lee , James O'Malley , Yaakov Stern , Zhigang Li

Causal decomposition analysis (CDA) is an approach for modeling the impact of hypothetical interventions to reduce disparities. It is useful for identifying foci that future interventions, including multilevel and multimodal interventions,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-28 John W. Jackson , Ting-Hsuan Chang , Aster Meche , Trang Q. Nguyen

Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-30 Shunichiro Orihara , Shinpei Imori , Kosuke Morikawa , Atsushi Goto , Masataka Taguri

While estimation of the marginal (total) causal effect of a point exposure on an outcome is arguably the most common objective of experimental and observational studies in the health and social sciences, in recent years, investigators have…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-10-18 Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , Ilya Shpitser

Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-24 Maximilian Ilse , Patrick Forré , Max Welling , Joris M. Mooij

In causal mediation studies that decompose an average treatment effect into a natural indirect effect (NIE) and a natural direct effect (NDE), examples of post-treatment confounding are abundant. Past research has generally considered it…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-26 Guanglei Hong , Fan Yang , Xu Qin

Causal decomposition analysis provides a way to identify mediators that contribute to health disparities between marginalized and non-marginalized groups. In particular, the degree to which a disparity would be reduced or remain after…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-16 Soojin Park , Suyeon Kang , Chioun Lee

Causality lays the foundation for the trajectory of our world. Causal inference (CI), which aims to infer intrinsic causal relations among variables of interest, has emerged as a crucial research topic. Nevertheless, the lack of observation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Yaochen Zhu , Yinhan He , Jing Ma , Mengxuan Hu , Sheng Li , Jundong Li

One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-03 Ricardo Silva , Robin Evans