Related papers: Detecting and Understanding the Difference between…
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…
The use of causal mediation analysis to evaluate the pathways by which an exposure affects an outcome is widespread in the social and biomedical sciences. Recent advances in this area have established formal conditions for identification…
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…
A common concern when trying to draw causal inferences from observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding. In practice, many of the covariates may only be proxies of the…
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…
Recently, the separable indirect effect (SIE) has gained attention due to its identifiability without requiring the untestable cross-world assumption necessary for the natural indirect effect (NIE). This article systematically compares the…
Mediation analysis in causal inference has traditionally focused on binary exposures and deterministic interventions, and a decomposition of the average treatment effect in terms of direct and indirect effects. In this paper we present an…
The incorporation of causal inference in mediation analysis has led to theoretical and methodological advancements -- effect definitions with causal interpretation, clarification of assumptions required for effect identification, and an…
Mediation analysis is a strategy for understanding the mechanisms by which treatments or interventions affect later outcomes. Mediation analysis is frequently applied in randomized trial settings, but typically assumes: a) that randomized…
Unmeasured confounding, unethical exposure, and ill-defined interventions pose significant challenges to evaluating policy-relevant mediation estimands in medicine and public health. In observational studies involving harmful exposures, the…
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,…
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…
Mediation analysis is appealing for its ability to improve understanding of the mechanistic drivers of causal effects, but real-world data complexities challenge its successful implementation, including: 1) the existence of post-exposure…
Statistical fairness metrics in AI-driven credit decisions conflate two causally distinct mechanisms: discrimination operating directly from a protected attribute to a credit outcome, and structural inequality propagating through legitimate…
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…
Natural direct and indirect effects are mediational estimands that decompose the average treatment effect and describe how outcomes would be affected by contrasting levels of a treatment through changes induced in mediator values (in the…
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…
In causal mediation analysis, identification of existing causal direct or indirect effects requires untestable assumptions in which potential outcomes and potential mediators are independent. This paper defines a new causal direct and…
Indirect comparisons of treatment-specific outcomes across separate studies often inform decision-making in the absence of head-to-head randomized comparisons. Differences in baseline characteristics between study populations may introduce…
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…