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Related papers: Testing Mechanisms

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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…

There is a growing literature on finding so-called optimal treatment rules, which are rules by which to assign treatment to individuals based on an individual's characteristics, such that a desired outcome is maximized. A related goal…

Applications · Statistics 2021-01-22 Kara E. Rudolph , Ivan Diaz

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

Uncovering causal mediation effects is of significant value to practitioners seeking to isolate the direct treatment effect from the potential mediated effect. We propose a double machine learning (DML) algorithm for mediation analysis that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-11 Houssam Zenati , Judith Abécassis , Julie Josse , Bertrand Thirion

Mediation analysis seeks to understand the mechanism by which a treatment affects an outcome. Count or zero-inflated count outcome are common in many studies in which mediation analysis is of interest. For example, in dental studies,…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-07-12 Zijian Guo , Dylan S. Small , Stuart A. Gansky , Jing Cheng

In randomized trials, once the total effect of the intervention has been estimated, it is often of interest to explore mechanistic effects through mediators along the causal pathway between the randomized treatment and the outcome. In the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-28 Erin E Gabriel , Michael C Sachs , Arvid Sjölander

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Çağlar Hızlı , ST John , Anne Juuti , Tuure Saarinen , Kirsi Pietiläinen , Pekka Marttinen

The fundamental problem of causal inference -- that we never observe counterfactuals -- prevents us from identifying how many might be negatively affected by a proposed intervention. If, in an A/B test, half of users click (or buy, or…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-22 Nathan Kallus

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

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

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 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

Causal mediation analysis decomposes the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into the indirect effect, operating through the mediator, and the direct effect, operating through other pathways. One can estimate only the pure indirect…

Applications · Statistics 2025-07-16 Vindyani Herath , Ronald J. Bosch , Judith J. Lok

Mediation analysis aims to decipher the underlying causal mechanisms between an exposure, an outcome, and intermediate variables called mediators. Initially developed for fixed-time mediator and outcome, it has been extended to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-15 K. Le Bourdonnec , L. Valeri , C. Proust-Lima

Identification of standard mediated effects such as the natural indirect effect relies on heavy causal assumptions. By circumventing such assumptions, so-called randomized interventional indirect effects have gained popularity in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-03 Caleb H. Miles

Testing for mediation effect poses a challenge since the null hypothesis (i.e., the absence of mediation effects) is composite, making most existing mediation tests quite conservative and often underpowered. In this work, we propose a…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-20 Asmita Roy , Huijuan Zhou , Ni Zhao , Xianyang Zhang

The goal of causal mediation analysis, often described within the potential outcomes framework, is to decompose the effect of an exposure on an outcome of interest along different causal pathways. Using the assumption of sequential…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-09 Lexi Rene , Antonio R. Linero , Elizabeth Slate

E-commerce companies have a number of online products, such as organic search, sponsored search, and recommendation modules, to fulfill customer needs. Although each of these products provides a unique opportunity for users to interact with…

Applications · Statistics 2020-06-23 Xuan Yin , Liangjie Hong

We study how inference methods for settings with few treated units that rely on treatment effect homogeneity extend to alternative inferential targets when treatment effects are heterogeneous -- namely, tests of sharp null hypotheses,…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-19 Luis Alvarez , Bruno Ferman

In genome-wide epigenetic studies, exposures (e.g., Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) affect outcomes (e.g., gene expression) through intermediate variables such as DNA methylation. Mediation analysis offers a way to study these intermediate…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-08 Asmita Roy , Xianyang Zhang