Related papers: Assessing mediation in cross-sectional stepped wed…
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…
Stepped wedge designs (SWDs) are increasingly used to evaluate longitudinal cluster-level interventions but pose substantial challenges for valid inference. Because crossover times are randomized, intervention effects are intrinsically…
Across research disciplines, cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are commonly implemented to evaluate interventions delivered to groups of participants, such as communities and clinics. Despite advances in the design and analysis of CRTs,…
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,…
Treatment effect estimands based on win statistics, including the win ratio, win odds, and win difference are increasingly popular targets for summarizing endpoints in clinical trials. Such win estimands offer an intuitive approach for…
The Stepped Wedge Design (SWD) is a form of cluster randomized trial, usually comparing two treatments, which is divided into time periods and sequences, with clusters allocated to sequences. Typically all sequences start with the standard…
Mediation analysis is a powerful tool for studying causal pathways between exposure, mediator, and outcome variables of interest. While classical mediation analysis using observational data often requires strong and sometimes unrealistic…
Causal mediation analysis in cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) is essential for explaining how cluster-level interventions affect individual outcomes, yet it is complicated by interference, post-treatment confounding, and hierarchical…
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…
In this article, we develop methods for sample size and power calculations in four-level intervention studies when intervention assignment is carried out at any level, with a particular focus on cluster randomized trials (CRTs). CRTs…
An essential goal of program evaluation and scientific research is the investigation of causal mechanisms. Over the past several decades, causal mediation analysis has been used in medical and social sciences to decompose the treatment…
Traditional mediation analysis typically examines the relations among an intervention, a time-invariant mediator, and a time-invariant outcome variable. Although there may be a direct effect of the intervention on the outcome, there is a…
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…
Analyses of causal mediation often involve exposure-induced confounders or, relatedly, multiple mediators. In such applications, researchers aim to estimate a variety of different quantities, including interventional direct and indirect…
The weighted controlled direct effect (WCDE) generalizes the standard controlled direct effect (CDE) by averaging over the mediator distribution, providing a robust estimate when treatment effects vary across mediator levels. This makes the…
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…
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…
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.…
The synthetic control method (SCM) allows estimating the causal effect of an intervention in settings where panel data on a small number of treated and control units are available. We show that the existing SCM, as well as its extensions,…
Mediation analysis in causal inference typically concentrates on one binary exposure, using deterministic interventions to split the average treatment effect into direct and indirect effects through a single mediator. Yet, real-world…