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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…
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…
Direct effect analyses usually require deciding whether a focal variable is a pre-exposure confounder or a post-exposure mediator. In observational studies, that distinction may be unclear because timing is measured coarsely or the variable…
Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…
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…
Making causal inferences from observational studies can be challenging when confounders are missing not at random. In such cases, identifying causal effects is often not guaranteed. Motivated by a real example, we consider a…
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…
In many social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, treatment effect estimation is a crucial step in understanding the impact of an intervention, policy, or treatment. In recent years, an increasing emphasis has been placed on…
We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…
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…
One of the major challenges in estimating conditional potential outcomes and conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is the presence of hidden confounders. Since testing for hidden confounders cannot be accomplished only with…
Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…
It is often of interest to decompose a total effect of an exposure into the component that acts on the outcome through some mediator and the component that acts independently through other pathways. Said another way, we are interested in…
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…
To estimate direct and indirect effects of an exposure on an outcome from observed data strong assumptions about unconfoundedness are required. Since these assumptions cannot be tested using the observed data, a mediation analysis should…
Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…
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…
Given a causal graph, the do-calculus can express treatment effects as functionals of the observational joint distribution that can be estimated empirically. Sometimes the do-calculus identifies multiple valid formulae, prompting us to…
Causal effect estimation from observational data is one of the essential problems in causal inference. However, most estimation methods rely on the strong assumption that all confounders are observed, which is impractical and untestable in…
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…