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Mediation analysis has traditionally focused on outcome-level summary contrasts, such as mean effects, which may obscure substantial distributional changes induced by complex and nonlinear causal mechanisms. We propose Distributional Causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Jinlun Zhang , Haoneng Huang , Zishu Zhan , Chunquan Ou

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-19 Kara E Rudolph , Nicholas Williams , Ivan Diaz

The same intervention can produce different effects in different sites. Transport mediation estimators can estimate the extent to which such differences can be explained by differences in compositional factors and the mechanisms by which…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-16 Kara E. Rudolph , Ivan Diaz

Causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into a portion operating through a hypothesized mediator and a residual direct portion. Identification of natural direct and indirect effects typically rests on the mediator…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Yuki Ohnishi , Fan Li

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

Instrumental variable methods are fundamental to causal inference when treatment assignment is confounded by unobserved variables. In this article, we develop a general nonparametric causal framework for identification and learning with…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-10 Shuyuan Chen , Peng Zhang , Yifan Cui

Causal mediation analysis with random interventions has become an area of significant interest for understanding time-varying effects with longitudinal and survival outcomes. To tackle causal and statistical challenges due to the complex…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-12 Zeyi Wang , Lars van der Laan , Maya Petersen , Thomas Gerds , Kajsa Kvist , Mark van der Laan

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-08-14 Isabel R. Fulcher , Xu Shi , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-24 Maximilian Ilse , Patrick Forré , Max Welling , Joris M. Mooij

The average causal mediation effect (ACME) and the natural direct effect (NDE) are two parameters of primary interest in causal mediation analysis. However, the two causal parameters are not identifiable from randomized experimental data in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-04 Wei Liang , Changbao Wu

The method of instrumental variables provides a fundamental and practical tool for causal inference in many empirical studies where unmeasured confounding between the treatments and the outcome is present. Modern data such as the genetical…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-28 Ziang Niu , Yuwen Gu , Wei Li

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-25 Shuozhi Zuo , Debashis Ghosh , Peng Ding , Fan Yang

In cluster-randomized trials (CRTs), there is emerging interest in exploring the causal mechanism in which a cluster-level treatment affects the outcome through an intermediate outcome. The majority of existing causal mediation methods are…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Chao Cheng , Fan Li

Causal mediation analysis aims to estimate the natural direct and indirect effects under clearly specified assumptions. Traditional mediation analysis based on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) relies on the absence of unmeasured causes of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-07-07 Cedric E. Ginestet , Richard Emsley , Sabine Landau

An important problem in causal inference is to break down the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into different causal pathways and to quantify the causal effect in each pathway. For instance, in causal fairness, the total effect of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-10 Lu Cheng , Ruocheng Guo , Huan Liu

We propose a new method to estimate causal effects from nonexperimental data. Each pair of sample units is first associated with a stochastic 'treatment' - differences in factors between units - and an effect - a resultant outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-08 Andre F. Ribeiro , Frank Neffke , Ricardo Hausmann

In many applications, researchers are interested in the direct and indirect causal effects of a treatment or exposure on an outcome of interest. Mediation analysis offers a rigorous framework for identifying and estimating these causal…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-08 Yizhen Xu , Numair Sani , AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser

Causal mediation analysis seeks to investigate how the treatment effect of an exposure on outcomes is mediated through intermediate variables. Although many applications involve longitudinal data, the existing methods are not directly…

Applications · Statistics 2021-02-24 Shuxi Zeng , Stacy Rosenbaum , Elizabeth Archie , Susan Alberts , Fan Li

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

Causal mediation analysis of observational data is an important tool for investigating the potential causal effects of medications on disease-related risk factors, and on time-to-death (or disease progression) through these risk factors.…