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Related papers: Balancing Weights for Causal Mediation Analysis

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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…

Causal mediation analysis (CMA) is a powerful method to dissect the total effect of a treatment into direct and mediated effects within the potential outcome framework. This is important in many scientific applications to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Ziyang Jiang , Yiling Liu , Michael H. Klein , Ahmed Aloui , Yiman Ren , Keyu Li , Vahid Tarokh , David Carlson

This article introduces a new estimator of average treatment effects under unobserved confounding in modern data-rich environments featuring large numbers of units and outcomes. The proposed estimator is doubly robust, combining outcome…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-10-30 Alberto Abadie , Anish Agarwal , Raaz Dwivedi , Abhin Shah

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

In observational studies, balancing covariates in different treatment groups is essential to estimate treatment effects. One of the most commonly used methods for such purposes is weighting. The performance of this class of methods usually…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-07 Ruoqi Yu , Shulei Wang

Many scientific questions in biomedical, environmental, and psychological research involve understanding the effects of multiple factors on outcomes. While factorial experiments are ideal for this purpose, randomized controlled treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-03 Ruoqi Yu , Peng Ding

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-09 Ruiyang Lin , Yongyi Guo , Kyra Gan

Researchers are often interested in learning not only the effect of treatments on outcomes, but also the pathways through which these effects operate. A mediator is a variable that is affected by treatment and subsequently affects outcome.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-22 Jeremiah Jones , Ashkan Ertefaie , Robert L. Strawderman

We study optimal covariate balance for causal inferences from observational data when rich covariates and complex relationships necessitate flexible modeling with neural networks. Standard approaches such as propensity weighting and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-16 Nathan Kallus

Mediation analysis is an important tool for studying causal associations in biomedical and other scientific areas and has recently gained attention in microbiome studies. Using a microbiome study of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients, we…

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

With reference to a single mediator context, this brief report presents a model-based strategy to estimate counterfactual direct and indirect effects when the response variable is ordinal and the mediator is binary. Postulating a logistic…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-25 Elena Stanghellini , Maria Kateri

Collaboration between different data centers is often challenged by heterogeneity across sites. To account for the heterogeneity, the state-of-the-art method is to re-weight the covariate distributions in each site to match the distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-25 Tianyu Guo , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Michael I. Jordan

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

Estimating causal effects from observational data informs us about which factors are important in an autonomous system, and enables us to take better decisions. This is important because it has applications in selecting a treatment in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Plabon Shaha , Talha Islam Zadid , Ismat Rahman , Md. Mosaddek Khan

In this paper, I try to tame "Basu's elephants" (data with extreme selection on observables). I propose new practical large-sample and finite-sample methods for estimating and inferring heterogeneous causal effects (under unconfoundedness)…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-01-20 Ganesh Karapakula

Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

Propensity score methods are increasingly being used to reduce estimation bias of treatment effects for observational studies. Previous research has shown that propensity score methods consistently estimate the marginal hazard ratio for…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-19 Haodi Liang , Cecilia Cotton

Integrating multiple observational studies to make unconfounded causal or descriptive comparisons of group potential outcomes in a large natural population is challenging. Moreover, retrospective cohorts, being convenience samples, are…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-19 Subharup Guha , Yi Li

Causal mediation analysis in cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) is complicated by the presence of multiple mediators, intracluster correlation, and within-cluster interference. Existing mediation methods often fall short in accommodating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Jiaqi Tong , Chao Cheng , Fan Li