English
Related papers

Related papers: A Bayesian nonparametric approach for causal infer…

200 papers

Causal mediation analysis concerns the pathways through which a treatment affects an outcome. While most of the mediation literature focuses on settings with a single mediator, a flourishing line of research has examined settings involving…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-12 Xiang Zhou

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

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

The estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects in the potential outcome setting is biased when there exists model misspecification or unobserved confounding. As these biases are unobservable, what model to use when remains a critical…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-09 Shonosuke Sugasawa , Kosaku Takanashi , Kenichiro McAlinn , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Deciding on an appropriate intervention requires a causal model of a treatment, the outcome, and potential mediators. Causal mediation analysis lets us distinguish between direct and indirect effects of the intervention, but has mostly been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Çağlar Hızlı , ST John , Anne Juuti , Tuure Saarinen , Kirsi Pietiläinen , Pekka Marttinen

A common concern when trying to draw causal inferences from observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding. In practice, many of the covariates may only be proxies of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-31 Oliver Dukes , Ilya Shpitser , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

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

Randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for estimating causal effects. Nevertheless, in studies that are aimed at examining adverse effects of interventions, such trials are often impractical because of ethical and…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-01-20 Anthony D. Scotina , Andrew R. Zullo , Robert J. Smith , Roee Gutman

This paper considers the practically important case of nonparametrically estimating heterogeneous average treatment effects that vary with a limited number of discrete and continuous covariates in a selection-on-observables framework where…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-08-26 Michael Zimmert , Michael Lechner

Causal discovery and inference from observational data is an essential problem in statistics posing both modeling and computational challenges. These are typically addressed by imposing strict assumptions on the joint distribution such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Enrico Giudice , Jack Kuipers , Giusi Moffa

Causal inference relies on the untestable assumption of no unmeasured confounding. Sensitivity analysis can be used to quantify the impact of unmeasured confounding on causal estimates. Among sensitivity analysis methods proposed in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-12 Yushu Zou , Liangyuan Hu , Amanda Ricciuto , Mark Deneau , Kuan Liu

Causal mediation analysis in cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) is complicated by the presence of multiple mediators, intracluster correlation, and within-cluster interference. Existing mediation methods often fall short in accommodating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Jiaqi Tong , Chao Cheng , Fan Li

Mediation analysis allows one to use observational data to estimate the importance of each potential mediating pathway involved in the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome. However, current approaches to mediation analysis with…

We propose nonparametric identification and semiparametric estimation of joint potential outcome distributions in the presence of confounding. First, in settings with observed confounding, we derive tighter, covariate-informed bounds on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-19 Jianle Sun , Kun Zhang

Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-18 Shanshan Luo , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li

We propose a general method to carry out a valid Bayesian analysis of a finite-dimensional `targeted' parameter in the presence of a finite-dimensional nuisance parameter. We apply our methods to causal inference based on estimating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Magid Sabbagh , David A. Stephens

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

Mediation analysis in causal inference typically concentrates on one binary exposure, using deterministic interventions to split the average treatment effect into direct and indirect effects through a single mediator. Yet, real-world…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-07 David B. McCoy , Alan E. Hubbard , Mark van der Laan , Alejandro Schuler

Causal inference with observational longitudinal data and time-varying exposures is often complicated by time-dependent confounding and attrition. The G-computation formula is one approach for estimating a causal effect in this setting. The…

Applications · Statistics 2020-10-14 Maria Josefsson , Michael J. Daniels

While observational data are routinely used to estimate causal effects of biomedical treatments, doing so requires special methods to adjust for observed confounding. These methods invariably rely on untestable statistical and causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-02 Arman Oganisian