English
Related papers

Related papers: Causal Mediation in Natural Experiments

200 papers

Probabilities of Causation play a fundamental role in decision making in law, health care and public policy. Nevertheless, their point identification is challenging, requiring strong assumptions such as monotonicity. In the absence of such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-06 Numair Sani , Atalanti A. Mastakouri , Dominik Janzing

Mediation analysis serves as a crucial tool to obtain causal inference based on directed acyclic graphs, which has been widely employed in the areas of biomedical science, social science, epidemiology and psychology. Decomposition of total…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-04-14 Xin Gao , Li Li , Li Luo

\textbf{Background:} Mediation analysis is widely used to investigate how treatments and programs exert their effects, but standard ordinary least squares (OLS) inference can be unreliable when regression errors are non-Gaussian. In medical…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-10 Mijeong Kim

The micro-randomized trial (MRT) is a sequential randomized experimental design to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of mobile health (mHealth) intervention components that may be delivered at hundreds or thousands of decision points.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-14 Jieru Shi , Zhenke Wu , Walter Dempsey

Causal mediation analyses investigate the mechanisms through which causes exert their effects, and are therefore central to scientific progress. The literature on the non-parametric definition and identification of mediational effects in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-13 Richard Liu , Nicholas T. Williams , Kara E. Rudolph , Iván Díaz

Applied researchers in biomedicine and related fields are often interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment or intervention. Although randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for establishing causal effects,…

Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) with multiple unstructured mediators present significant methodological challenges for causal inference due to within-cluster correlation, interference among units, and the complexity introduced by multiple…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-21 Yuki Ohnishi , Fan Li

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-19 Max Rubinstein , Zach Branson , Edward H. Kennedy

This paper develops methods for estimating the natural direct and indirect effects in causal mediation analysis. The efficient influence function-based estimator (EIF-based estimator) and the inverse probability weighting estimator (IPW…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-11 Kentaro Kawato

Mediation analysis is becoming an increasingly important tool in scientific studies. A central question in high-dimensional mediation analysis is to infer the significance of individual mediators. The main challenge is the sheer number of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-23 Chengchun Shi , Lexin Li

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…

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-02 Yijiao Zhang , Yubai Yuan , Yuexia Zhang , Zhongyi Zhu , Annie Qu

Organizations increasingly rely on predictive models to decide who should be targeted for interventions, such as marketing campaigns, customer retention offers, or medical treatments. Yet these models are usually built to predict outcomes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-24 Carlos Fernández-Loría , Yanfang Hou , Foster Provost , Jennifer Hill

The causal inference literature has increasingly recognized that explicitly targeting treatment effect heterogeneity can lead to improved scientific understanding and policy recommendations. Towards the same ends, studying the causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-06 Angela Ting , Antonio R. Linero

Causal variance decompositions for a given disease-specific quality indicator can be used to quantify differences in performance between hospitals or health care providers. While variance decompositions can demonstrate variation in quality…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-26 Bo Chen , Keith A. Lawson , Antonio Finelli , Olli Saarela

Causal machine learning (CML) has experienced increasing popularity in healthcare. Beyond the inherent capabilities of adding domain knowledge into learning systems, CML provides a complete toolset for investigating how a system would react…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Pedro Sanchez , Jeremy P. Voisey , Tian Xia , Hannah I. Watson , Alison Q. ONeil , Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

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…

Applications · Statistics 2020-08-28 Xizhen Cai , Donna L. Coffman , Megan E. Piper , Runze Li

Mediation analysis has been used in many disciplines to explain the mechanism or process that underlies an observed relationship between an exposure variable and an outcome variable via the inclusion of mediators. Decompositions of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-03 Xin Gao , Li Li , Li Luo

This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers--one person's treatment may affect another's outcome--and one-sided non-compliance--subjects can…

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