Related papers: Heterogeneous interventional indirect effects with…
Decomposing an exposure effect on an outcome into separate natural indirect effects through multiple mediators requires strict assumptions, such as correctly postulating the causal structure of the mediators, and no unmeasured confounding…
Although the exposure can be randomly assigned in studies of mediation effects, any form of direct intervention on the mediator is often infeasible. As a result, unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding can seldom be ruled out. We propose…
Understanding the pathways whereby an intervention has an effect on an outcome is a common scientific goal. A rich body of literature provides various decompositions of the total intervention effect into pathway specific effects.…
Causal mediation analysis has historically been limited in two important ways: (i) a focus has traditionally been placed on binary treatments and static interventions, and (ii) direct and indirect effect decompositions have been pursued…
Recent approaches to causal inference have focused on causal effects defined as contrasts between the distribution of counterfactual outcomes under hypothetical interventions on the nodes of a graphical model. In this article we develop…
We demonstrate a comprehensive semiparametric approach to causal mediation analysis, addressing the complexities inherent in settings with longitudinal and continuous treatments, confounders, and mediators. Our methodology utilizes a…
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…
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…
Path-specific effects are a broad class of mediated effects from an exposure to an outcome via one or more causal pathways with respect to some subset of intermediate variables. The majority of the literature concerning estimation of…
Estimating treatment effects conditional on observed covariates can improve the ability to tailor treatments to particular individuals. Doing so effectively requires dealing with potential confounding, and also enough data to adequately…
To investigate causal mechanisms, causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into the natural direct and indirect effects. This paper examines the estimation of the direct and indirect effects in a general treatment…
With multiple potential mediators on the causal pathway from a treatment to an outcome, we consider the problem of decomposing the effects along multiple possible causal path(s) through each distinct mediator. Under Pearl's path-specific…
We propose a novel approach for causal mediation analysis based on changes-in-changes assumptions restricting unobserved heterogeneity over time. This allows disentangling the causal effect of a binary treatment on a continuous outcome into…
Analyses of causal mediation often involve exposure-induced confounders or, relatedly, multiple mediators. In such applications, researchers aim to estimate a variety of different quantities, including interventional direct and indirect…
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…
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…
Mediation analysis is difficult when the number of potential mediators is larger than the sample size. In this paper we propose new inference procedures for the indirect effect in the presence of high-dimensional mediators for linear…
Mediation analysis breaks down the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome into an indirect effect, acting through a third group of variables called mediators, and a direct effect, operating through other mechanisms. Mediation analysis…
Causal mediation analysis provides techniques for defining and estimating effects that may be endowed with mechanistic interpretations. With many scientific investigations seeking to address mechanistic questions, causal direct and indirect…
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…