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Mediation analysis is concerned with the decomposition of the total effect of an exposure on an outcome into the indirect effect through a given mediator, and the remaining direct effect. This is ideally done using longitudinal measurements…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-04 Murthy N Mittinty , Stijn Vansteelandt

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-12 Haoyu Wei , Hengrui Cai , Chengchun Shi , Rui Song

Mediation analyses play important roles in making causal inference in biomedical research to examine causal pathways that may be mediated by one or more intermediate variables (i.e., mediators). Although mediation frameworks have been well…

Applications · Statistics 2023-01-25 Meilin Jiang , Seonjoo Lee , James O'Malley , Yaakov Stern , Zhigang Li

The same intervention can produce different effects in different sites. Transport mediation estimators can estimate the extent to which such differences can be explained by differences in compositional factors and the mechanisms by which…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-16 Kara E. Rudolph , Ivan Diaz

We propose a new Bayesian non-parametric (BNP) method for estimating the causal effects of mediation in the presence of a post-treatment confounder. We specify an enriched Dirichlet process mixture (EDPM) to model the joint distribution of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-10 Woojung Bae , Michael J. Daniels , Michael G. Perri

Mediation analysis is widely used for investigating direct and indirect causal pathways through which an effect arises. However, many mediation analysis studies are challenged by missingness in the mediator and outcome. In general, when the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-25 Shuozhi Zuo , Debashis Ghosh , Peng Ding , Fan Yang

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 has been widely used to investigate how a treatment influences an outcome through intermediate variables, known as mediators. Analyzing a mediation mechanism typically requires assessing multiple model parameters that…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-01 Hanying Jiang , Kris Sankaran , Yinqiu He

Understanding causal mechanisms is crucial for explaining and generalizing empirical phenomena. Causal mediation analysis offers statistical techniques to quantify the mediation effects. Although numerous methods have been developed for…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Jiawei Fu

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…

Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-24 Maximilian Ilse , Patrick Forré , Max Welling , Joris M. Mooij

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

Causal decomposition analysis provides a way to identify mediators that contribute to health disparities between marginalized and non-marginalized groups. In particular, the degree to which a disparity would be reduced or remain after…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-16 Soojin Park , Suyeon Kang , Chioun Lee

Experimental and observational studies often lead to spurious association between the outcome and independent variables describing the intervention, because of confounding to third-party factors. Even in randomized clinical trials,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-04 Orestis Loukas , Ho Ryun Chung

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Beatrijs Moerkerke , Tom Loeys , Stijn Vansteelandt

Causal mediation analysis aims at disentangling a treatment effect into an indirect mechanism operating through an intermediate outcome or mediator, as well as the direct effect of the treatment on the outcome of interest. However, the…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-05 Martin Huber , Lukáš Lafférs

Causal mediation analysis (CMA) is a powerful method to dissect the total effect of a treatment into direct and mediated effects within the potential outcome framework. This is important in many scientific applications to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Ziyang Jiang , Yiling Liu , Michael H. Klein , Ahmed Aloui , Yiman Ren , Keyu Li , Vahid Tarokh , David Carlson

This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Sohaib Kiani , Jared Barton , Jon Sushinsky , Lynda Heimbach , Bo Luo

Several frameworks have been proposed for studying causal mediation analysis. What these frameworks have in common is that they all make assumptions for point identifications that can be violated even when treatment is randomized. When a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-23 Marie S. Breum , Vanessa Didelez , Erin E. Gabriel , Michael C. Sachs

Understanding the effects of interventions is central to scientific progress, with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarded as the gold standard for causal inference in many applied fields. However, RCTs are costly, time-consuming, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-27 Drago Plecko , Patrik Okanovic , Torsten Hoefler , Elias Bareinboim