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Related papers: Testing Mechanisms

200 papers

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning has attracted substantial attention in both academic research and industrial practice. However, the two communities often evaluate models under markedly different conditions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 George Panagopoulos

Testing for a mediation effect is important in many disciplines, but is made difficult - even asymptotically - by the influence of nuisance parameters. Classical tests such as likelihood ratio (LR) and Wald (Sobel) tests have very poor…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-03-05 Grant Hillier , Kees Jan van Garderen , Noud van Giersbergen

We propose a novel method, termed the M-learner, for estimating heterogeneous indirect and total treatment effects and identifying relevant subgroups within a mediation framework. The procedure comprises four key steps. First, we compute…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-14 Xingyu Li , Qing Liu , Tony Jiang , Hong Amy Xia , Brian P. Hobbs , Peng Wei

Relationships of cause and effect are of prime importance for explaining scientific phenomena. Often, rather than just understanding the effects of causes, researchers also wish to understand how a cause $X$ affects an outcome $Y$…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-14 Drago Plecko

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

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…

We study high-dimensional mediation analysis in which exposures, mediators, and outcomes are all multivariate, and both exposures and mediators may be high-dimensional. We formalize this as a many (exposures)-to-many (mediators)-to-many…

Network interference amounts to the treatment status of one unit affecting the potential outcome of other units in the population. Testing for spillover effects in this setting makes the null hypothesis non-sharp. An interesting approach to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-24 Supriya Tiwari , Pallavi Basu

This paper provides a general framework for testing instrument validity in heterogeneous causal effect models. The generalization includes the cases where the treatment can be multivalued ordered or unordered. Based on a series of testable…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-10-11 Zhenting Sun

Two-sided marketplace platforms often run experiments to test the effect of an intervention before launching it platform-wide. A typical approach is to randomize individuals into the treatment group, which receives the intervention, and the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-27 Hannah Li , Geng Zhao , Ramesh Johari , Gabriel Y. Weintraub

We consider the problem of indirect comparison, where a treatment arm of interest is absent by design in one randomized controlled trial but available in the other. The former is the target trial, and the latter is the source trial. The…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-06 Zehao Su , Helene C. W. Rytgaard , Henrik Ravn , Frank Eriksson

Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for making informed decisions in medicine, yet they often lack generalizability to the patient populations in clinical practice. Observational studies, on the other hand, cover a broader…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Piersilvio De Bartolomeis , Javier Abad , Konstantin Donhauser , Fanny Yang

In two-sided matching markets with contracts, quantile (or generalized median) stable mechanisms represent an interesting class that produces stable allocations which can be viewed as compromises between both sides of the market. These…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-18 R. Pablo Arribillaga , Eliana Pepa-Risma

How can one determine whether a community-level treatment, such as the introduction of a social program or trade shock, alters agents' incentives to form links in a network? This paper proposes analogues of a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-11-24 Eric Auerbach

For testing the statistical significance of a treatment effect, we usually compare between two parts of a population, one is exposed to the treatment, and the other is not exposed to it. Standard parametric and nonparametric two-sample…

Computation · Statistics 2012-11-02 Bikram Karmakar , Kumaresh Dhara , Kushal Kumar Dey , Analabha Basu , Anil Ghosh

Patients often discontinue treatment in a clinical trial because their health condition is not improving. Consequently, the patients still in the study at the end of the trial have better health outcomes on average than the initial patient…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-06 Alex Ocampo , Heinz Schmidli , Peter Quarg , Francesca Callegari , Marcello Pagano

The target trial framework enables causal inference from longitudinal observational data by emulating randomized trials initiated at multiple time points. Precision is often improved by pooling information across trials, with standard…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-08 Edoardo Efrem Gervasoni , Liesbet De Bus , Stijn Vansteelandt , Oliver Dukes

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

Long-term outcomes of experimental evaluations are necessarily observed after long delays. We develop semiparametric methods for combining the short-term outcomes of experiments with observational measurements of short-term and long-term…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-08-21 Jiafeng Chen , David M. Ritzwoller

Bounding causal effects analytically, rather than numerically, is appealing for its interpretability and conceptual clarity. Existing sharp methods rely on optimization-based approaches such as the Balke-Pearl framework, whose computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Arefe Boushehrian , Mohammad Reza Badri , Sina Akbari , Negar Kiyavash