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Clinical machine learning applications are often plagued with confounders that are clinically irrelevant, but can still artificially boost the predictive performance of the algorithms. Confounding is especially problematic in mobile health…

Applications · Statistics 2018-11-29 Elias Chaibub Neto

Recent advances in causal mediation analysis have formalized conditions for estimating direct and indirect effects in various contexts. These approaches have been extended to a number of models for survival outcomes including accelerated…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-01-11 Isabel R. Fulcher , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen , Paige L. Williams

Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

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

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…

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

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Aytijhya Saha , Stephen Bates , Devavrat Shah

Proximal causal inference is a recently proposed framework for evaluating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For point identification of causal effects, it leverages a pair of so-called treatment and outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Mediation analysis is a form of causal inference that investigates indirect effects and causal mechanisms. Confidence intervals for indirect effects play a central role in conducting inference. The problem is non-standard leading to…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-12-17 Kees Jan van Garderen , Noud van Giersbergen

Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical tool to quantify effects transmitted by intermediate variables from a cause to an outcome. There is a gap in mediation analysis methods to handle mixture mediator data that are…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-22 Meilin Jiang , Seonjoo Lee , A. James O'Malley , Pengfei Li , Zhigang Li

Random-effects meta-analyses of observational studies can produce biased estimates if the synthesized studies are subject to unmeasured confounding. We propose sensitivity analyses quantifying the extent to which unmeasured confounding of…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-10 Maya B. Mathur , Tyler J. VanderWeele

Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-04 Rajesh Ranganath , Adler Perotte

A parametric expression for causal natural direct and indirect effects is derived for the setting of a binary outcome with a binary mediator. The proposed effect decomposition does not require the outcome to be rare and generalizes the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-13 Marco Doretti , Martina Raggi , Elena Stanghellini

Decomposing a total causal effect into natural direct and indirect effects is central to revealing causal mechanisms. Conventional methods achieve the decomposition by specifying an outcome model as a linear function of the treatment, the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-05 Guanglei Hong

Performing causal inference in observational studies requires we assume confounding variables are correctly adjusted for. G-computation methods are often used in these scenarios, with several recent proposals using Bayesian versions of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-25 Daniel Daly-Grafstein , Paul Gustafson

Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-30 Shunichiro Orihara , Shinpei Imori , Kosuke Morikawa , Atsushi Goto , Masataka Taguri

Mediation analysis plays a crucial role in causal inference as it can investigate the pathways through which treatment influences outcome. Most existing mediation analysis assumes that mediation effects are static and homogeneous within…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-02 Yijiao Zhang , Yubai Yuan , Yuexia Zhang , Zhongyi Zhu , Annie Qu

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

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…

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

Political scientists are increasingly interested in assessing causal mechanisms, or determining not just if a causal effect exists but also why it occurs. Even so, many researchers avoid formal causal mediation analyses due to their…

Applications · Statistics 2024-11-21 Matthew Blackwell , Ruofan Ma , Aleksei Opacic