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Related papers: Unveiling Causal Mediation Pathways in High-Dimens…

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Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical method in social and medical studies, as it can provide insights about why an intervention works and inform the development of future interventions. Currently, most causal mediation…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-01-26 Cheng Zheng , David C. Atkins , Melissa A. Lewis , Xiao-Hua Zhou

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

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…

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-29 Ruixuan Rachel Zhou , Liewei Wang , Sihai Dave Zhao

A mediation analysis approach is proposed for multiple exposures, multiple mediators, and a continuous scalar outcome under the linear structural equation modeling framework. It assumes that there exist orthogonal components that…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-12 Yi Zhao

Mediation analysis has become a widely used method for identifying the pathways through which an independent variable influences a dependent variable via intermediate mediators. However, limited research addresses the case where mediators…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-10 Rui Ren , Haoyi Yang , Qian Xiao , Lingzhou Xue , Yuan Huang

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

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

Mediation analysis examines the pathways through which mediators transmit the effect of an exposure to an outcome. In high-dimensional settings, the joint significance test is commonly applied using variable screening followed by…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-26 Samuel Osarfo , Sangyoon Yi , Weijia Fu , Seungjun Ahn

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

Path-specific effects in mediation analysis provide a useful tool for fairness analysis, which is mostly based on nested counterfactuals. However, the dictum ``no causation without manipulation'' implies that path-specific effects might be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Heyang Gong , Ke Zhu

We consider the problem of identifying intermediate variables (or mediators) that regulate the effect of a treatment on a response variable. While there has been significant research on this classical topic, little work has been done when…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-29 Abhishek Chakrabortty , Preetam Nandy , Hongzhe Li

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

It is of substantial scientific interest to detect mediators that lie in the causal pathway from an exposure to a survival outcome. However, with high-dimensional mediators, as often encountered in modern genomic data settings, there is a…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-14 Tzu-Jung Huang , Zhonghua Liu , Ian W. McKeague

Recurrent events, including cardiovascular events, are commonly observed in biomedical studies. Researchers must understand the effects of various treatments on recurrent events and investigate the underlying mediation mechanisms by which…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-08 Yan-Lin Chen , Yan-Hong Chen , Pei-Fang Su , Huang-Tz Ou , An-Shun Tai

Mediation analysis for survival outcomes is challenging. Most existing methods quantify the treatment effect using the hazard ratio (HR) and attempt to decompose the HR into the direct effect of treatment plus an indirect, or mediated,…

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

Mediation analysis with contemporaneously observed multiple mediators is an important area of causal inference. Recent approaches for multiple mediators are often based on parametric models and thus may suffer from model misspecification.…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-30 Samrat Roy , Michael J. Daniels , Brendan J. Kelly , Jason Roy

Often linear regression is used to perform mediation analysis. However, in many instances, the underlying relationships may not be linear, as in the case of placental-fetal hormones and fetal development. Although, the exact functional form…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-16 Qing Yin , Jong-Hyeon Jeong , Xu Qin , Shyamal D Peddada , Jennifer Adibi

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-22 Jiawei Shan , Wei Li , Chunrong Ai