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There has been a growing interest in covariate adjustment in the analysis of randomized controlled trials in past years. For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently issued guidance that emphasizes the importance of…
With reference to a binary outcome and a binary mediator, we derive identification bounds for natural effects under a reduced set of assumptions. Specifically, no assumptions about confounding are made that involve the outcome; we only…
In causal mediation studies that decompose an average treatment effect into a natural indirect effect (NIE) and a natural direct effect (NDE), examples of post-treatment confounding are abundant. Past research has generally considered it…
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…
Pragmatic randomized trials are designed to provide evidence for clinical decision-making rather than regulatory approval. Common features of these trials include the inclusion of heterogeneous or diverse patient populations in a wide range…
Mediation analysis is widely used in health science research to evaluate the extent to which an intermediate variable explains an observed exposure-outcome relationship. However, the validity of analysis can be compromised when the exposure…
Matching is a widely used causal inference design that aims to approximate a randomized experiment using observational data by forming matched sets of treated and control units based on similarities in their covariates. Ideally, treated…
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…
We consider the problem of identifying intermediate variables (or mediators) that regulate the effect of a treatment on a response variable. While there has been significant research on this classical topic, little work has been done when…
Meta-analysis is commonly used to combine results from multiple clinical trials, but traditional meta-analysis methods do not refer explicitly to a population of individuals to whom the results apply and it is not clear how to use their…
Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals…
We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…
Background: Natural or quasi experiments are appealing for public health research because they enable the evaluation of events or interventions that are difficult or impossible to manipulate experimentally, such as many policy and health…
Most approaches in algorithmic fairness constrain machine learning methods so the resulting predictions satisfy one of several intuitive notions of fairness. While this may help private companies comply with non-discrimination laws or avoid…
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…
I study identification, estimation and inference for spillover effects in experiments where units' outcomes may depend on the treatment assignments of other units within a group. I show that the commonly-used reduced-form linear-in-means…
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…
Data from both a randomized trial and an observational study are sometimes simultaneously available for evaluating the effect of an intervention. The randomized data typically allows for reliable estimation of average treatment effects but…
We propose semi- and non-parametric methods to estimate conditional interventional effects in the setting of two discrete mediators whose causal ordering is unknown. Average interventional indirect effects have been shown to decompose an…
Randomized trials balance all covariates on average and provide the gold standard for estimating treatment effects. Chance imbalances nevertheless exist more or less in realized treatment allocations and intrigue an important question: what…