Related papers: Causal Inference with Hidden Mediators
An essential goal of program evaluation and scientific research is the investigation of causal mechanisms. Over the past several decades, causal mediation analysis has been used in medical and social sciences to decompose the treatment…
Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…
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…
Mediation analysis extending beyond single mediators has gained significant attention in recent years. However, related methods often assume the absence of unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding. To address this, we develop a mediation…
Mediation analysis is widely used for exploring treatment mechanisms; however, it faces challenges when nonignorable missing confounders are present. Efficient inference of mediation effects and the efficiency loss due to nonignorable…
We consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in linear structural causal models (SCM) with latent confounders when we have access to a single proxy variable. Several methods (such as…
Interventional effects for mediation analysis were proposed as a solution to the lack of identifiability of natural (in)direct effects in the presence of a mediator-outcome confounder affected by exposure. We present a theoretical and…
We propose a method to distinguish causal influence from hidden confounding in the following scenario: given a target variable Y, potential causal drivers X, and a large number of background features, we propose a novel criterion for…
Proxy variables are commonly used in causal inference when unmeasured confounding exists. While most existing proximal methods assume a unidirectional causal relationship between two primary variables, many social and biological systems…
Causal mediation analysis is a useful tool for epidemiological research, but it has been criticized for relying on a "cross-world" independence assumption that is empirically difficult to verify and problematic to justify based on…
We consider missingness in the context of causal inference when the outcome of interest may be missing. If the outcome directly affects its own missingness status, i.e., it is "self-censoring", this may lead to severely biased causal effect…
Causal mediation analysis seeks to investigate how the treatment effect of an exposure on outcomes is mediated through intermediate variables. Although many applications involve longitudinal data, the existing methods are not directly…
Causal models communicate our assumptions about causes and effects in real-world phe- nomena. Often the interest lies in the identification of the effect of an action which means deriving an expression from the observed probability…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
Contagion effect refers to the causal effect of peers' behavior on the outcome of an individual in social networks. Contagion can be confounded due to latent homophily which makes contagion effect estimation very hard: nodes in a homophilic…
We consider a causal effect that is confounded by an unobserved variable, but with observed proxy variables of the confounder. We show that, with at least two independent proxy variables satisfying a certain rank condition, the causal…
Causal mediation analysis is routinely conducted by applied researchers in a variety of disciplines. The goal of such an analysis is to investigate alternative causal mechanisms by examining the roles of intermediate variables that lie in…
In biomedical research, repeated measurements within each subject are often processed to remove artifacts and unwanted sources of variation. The resulting data are used to construct derived outcomes that act as proxies for scientific…
In many fields$\unicode{x2013}$including genomics, epidemiology, natural language processing, social and behavioral sciences, and economics$\unicode{x2013}$it is increasingly important to address causal questions in the context of factor…
We provide new results for nonparametric identification, estimation, and inference of causal effects using `proxy controls': observables that are noisy but informative proxies for unobserved confounding factors. Our analysis applies to…