English
Related papers

Related papers: Post-Treatment Confounding in Causal Mediation Stu…

200 papers

To estimate direct and indirect effects of an exposure on an outcome from observed data strong assumptions about unconfoundedness are required. Since these assumptions cannot be tested using the observed data, a mediation analysis should…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-03-29 Anita Lindmark , Xavier de Luna , Marie Eriksson

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-26 Jiajing Zheng , Jiaxi Wu , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Estimating treatment effects plays a crucial role in causal inference, having many real-world applications like policy analysis and decision making. Nevertheless, estimating treatment effects in the longitudinal setting in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Defu Cao , James Enouen , Yan Liu

Disparities in health or well-being experienced by minority groups can be difficult to study using the traditional exposure-outcome paradigm in causal inference, since potential outcomes in variables such as race or sexual minority status…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-22 Andy A. Shen , Elina Visoki , Ran Barzilay , Samuel D. Pimentel

Causal mediation analysis can improve understanding of the mechanisms underlying epidemiologic associations. However, the utility of natural direct and indirect effect estimation has been limited by the assumption of no confounder of the…

Applications · Statistics 2020-06-16 Kara E. Rudolph , Oleg Sofrygin , Wenjing Zheng , Mark J. van der Laan

Causal mediation analysis is a powerful tool for disentangling the total effect of a treatment into its direct effect on the outcome and its indirect effect mediated through an intermediate variable. However, in observational studies,…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-28 Yuhao Deng , Haoyu Wei , Zhongzhe Ouyang

This paper combines causal mediation analysis with double machine learning to control for observed confounders in a data-driven way under a selection-on-observables assumption in a high-dimensional setting. We consider the average indirect…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-02-17 Helmut Farbmacher , Martin Huber , Lukáš Lafférs , Henrika Langen , Martin Spindler

Recently, the separable indirect effect (SIE) has gained attention due to its identifiability without requiring the untestable cross-world assumption necessary for the natural indirect effect (NIE). This article systematically compares the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-08 Yan-Lin Chen , Sheng-Hsuan Lin

No unmeasured confounding is a common assumption when reasoning about counterfactual outcomes, but such an assumption may not be plausible in observational studies. Sensitivity analysis is often employed to assess the robustness of causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-20 Abhinandan Dalal , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-03-05 Ilya Shpitser

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

Consider sensitivity analysis to assess the worst-case possible values of counterfactual outcome means and average treatment effects under sequential unmeasured confounding in a longitudinal study with time-varying treatments and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-08-31 Zhiqiang Tan

We consider assessing causal mediation in the presence of a post-treatment event (examples include noncompliance, a clinical event, or death). We identify natural mediation effects for the entire study population and for each principal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-13 Chao Cheng , Fan Li

When constructing a model to estimate the causal effect of a treatment, it is necessary to control for other factors which may have confounding effects. Because the ignorability assumption is not testable, however, it is usually unclear…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-07 Spencer Woody , Carlos M. Carvalho , Jared S. Murray

We propose a model-free framework for sensitivity analysis of individual treatment effects (ITEs), building upon ideas from conformal inference. For any unit, our procedure reports the $\Gamma$-value, a number which quantifies the minimum…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-26 Ying Jin , Zhimei Ren , Emmanuel J. Candès

Causal mediation analysis has been extended to estimate path-specific effects with multiple intermediate variables, isolating treatment effects through a mediator of interest while excluding pathways through its ancestors. Such analyses…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yang Bai , Sihan Wu , Baoluo Sun , Yifan Cui

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Aytijhya Saha , Stephen Bates , Devavrat Shah

Estimating an individual treatment effect (ITE) is essential to personalized decision making. However, existing methods for estimating the ITE often rely on unconfoundedness, an assumption that is fundamentally untestable with observed…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-13 Mingzhang Yin , Claudia Shi , Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

In randomized trials, researchers are often interested in mediation analysis to understand how a treatment works, in particular how much of a treatment's effect is mediated by an intermediated variable and how much the treatment directly…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-01-01 Dylan S. Small