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This paper aims to provide practitioners of causal mediation analysis with a better understanding of estimation options. We take as inputs two familiar strategies (weighting and model-based prediction) and a simple way of combining them…

With reference to a binary outcome and a binary mediator, we derive identification bounds for natural effects under a reduced set of assumptions. Specifically, no assumptions about confounding are made that involve the outcome; we only…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-03 Marco Doretti , Elena Stanghellini

Many epidemiological questions concern potential interventions to alter the pathways presumed to mediate an association. For example, we consider a study that investigates the benefit of interventions in young adulthood for ameliorating the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-14 Margarita Moreno-Betancur , Paul Moran , Denise Becker , George C Patton , John B Carlin

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

Causal mediation analyses investigate the mechanisms through which causes exert their effects, and are therefore central to scientific progress. The literature on the non-parametric definition and identification of mediational effects in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-13 Richard Liu , Nicholas T. Williams , Kara E. Rudolph , Iván Díaz

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-01-13 Nima S. Hejazi , Kara E. Rudolph , Mark J. van der Laan , Iván Díaz

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

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…

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-26 Iván Díaz

In interventional health studies, causal mediation analysis can be employed to investigate mechanisms through which the intervention affects the targeted health outcome. Identifying direct and indirect (i.e. mediated) effects from empirical…

Mediation analysis seeks to identify and quantify the paths by which an exposure affects an outcome. Intermediate variables which are effected by the exposure and which effect the outcome are known as mediators. There exists extensive work…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-13 James P. Long , Ehsan Irajizad , James D. Doecke , Kim-Anh Do , Min Jin Ha

Causal mediation analysis examines causal pathways linking exposures to disease. The estimation of interventional effects, which are mediation estimands that overcome certain identifiability problems of natural effects, has been advanced…

Mediation analysis has been used in many disciplines to explain the mechanism or process that underlies an observed relationship between an exposure variable and an outcome variable via the inclusion of mediators. Decompositions of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-03 Xin Gao , Li Li , Li Luo

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

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…

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

Proximal causal inference was recently proposed as a framework to identify causal effects from observational data in the presence of hidden confounders for which proxies are available. In this paper, we extend the proximal causal inference…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-27 AmirEmad Ghassami , Alan Yang , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

The fundamental problem in treatment effect estimation from observational data is confounder identification and balancing. Most of the previous methods realized confounder balancing by treating all observed pre-treatment variables as…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Junkun Yuan , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Qiang Zhu , Yueting Zhuang , Fei Wu

Interventional effects have been proposed as a solution to the unidentifiability of natural (in)direct effects under mediator-outcome confounders affected by the exposure. Such confounders are an intrinsic characteristic of studies with…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-30 Iván Díaz , Nicholas Williams , Kara E. Rudolph

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