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Related papers: Causal Mediation in Natural Experiments

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A parametric expression for causal natural direct and indirect effects is derived for the setting of a binary outcome with a binary mediator. The proposed effect decomposition does not require the outcome to be rare and generalizes the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-13 Marco Doretti , Martina Raggi , Elena Stanghellini

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are ideal for estimating causal effects, because the distributions of background covariates are similar in expectation across treatment groups. When estimating causal effects using observational data,…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-27 Anthony D. Scotina , Roee Gutman

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-10 Kara E. Rudolph , Ivan Diaz

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-31 Oliver Dukes , Ilya Shpitser , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Causal mediation analysis is widely used to investigate how causal effects operate through specific pathways linking treatments or exposures to outcomes. Recently, \texttt{crumble} was developed to enable nonparametric estimation of several…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Richard Liu , Nicholas T. Williams , Kara E. Rudolph , Ivan Diaz

To investigate causal mechanisms, causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into the natural direct and indirect effects. This paper examines the estimation of the direct and indirect effects in a general treatment…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-24 Lukang Huang , Wei Huang , Oliver Linton , Zheng Zhang

Causal machine learning (ML) offers flexible, data-driven methods for predicting treatment outcomes including efficacy and toxicity, thereby supporting the assessment and safety of drugs. A key benefit of causal ML is that it allows for…

Mediation analysis is a form of causal inference that investigates indirect effects and causal mechanisms. Confidence intervals for indirect effects play a central role in conducting inference. The problem is non-standard leading to…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-12-17 Kees Jan van Garderen , Noud van Giersbergen

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.…

Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical tool to quantify effects transmitted by intermediate variables from a cause to an outcome. There is a gap in mediation analysis methods to handle mixture mediator data that are…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-22 Meilin Jiang , Seonjoo Lee , A. James O'Malley , Pengfei Li , Zhigang Li

We propose a novel methodology to quantify the effect of stochastic interventions on non-terminal time-to-events that lie on the pathway between an exposure and a terminal time-to-event outcome. Investigating these effects is particularly…

Although the exposure can be randomly assigned in studies of mediation effects, any form of direct intervention on the mediator is often infeasible. As a result, unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding can seldom be ruled out. We propose…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-30 BaoLuo Sun , Ting Ye

Online experimentation is at the core of Booking.com's customer-centric product development. While randomised controlled trials are a powerful tool for estimating the overall effects of product changes on business metrics, they often fall…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Bahattin Tolga Öztan , Zoé van Havre , Caio Gomes , Lukas Vermeer

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

We consider mediated effects of an exposure, X on an outcome, Y, via a mediator, M, under no unmeasured confounding assumptions in the setting where models for the conditional expectation of the mediator and outcome are partially linear. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-08 Oliver Hines , Stijn Vansteelandt , Karla Diaz-Ordaz

Intensive longitudinal data, characterized by frequent measurements across numerous time points, are increasingly common due to advances in wearable devices and mobile health technologies. We consider evaluating causal mediation pathways…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-26 Tianchen Qian

Recent studies have proposed causal machine learning (CML) methods to estimate conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). In this study, I investigate whether CML methods add value compared to conventional CATE estimators by…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-12-07 Anthony Strittmatter

Matching on covariates is a well-established framework for estimating causal effects in observational studies. The principal challenge stems from the often high-dimensional structure of the problem. Many methods have been introduced to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-12 Florian Gunsilius , Yuliang Xu

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-05 Martin Huber , Lukáš Lafférs

In interventional health studies, causal mediation analysis can be employed to investigate mechanisms through which the intervention affects the targeted health outcome. Identifying direct and indirect (i.e. mediated) effects from empirical…