English
Related papers

Related papers: Identifying and Estimating Causal Direct Effects U…

200 papers

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-18 Jesse Zhou , Geoffrey T. Wodtke

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

Natural experiments are a cornerstone of applied economics, providing settings for estimating causal effects with a compelling argument for treatment randomisation, but give little indication of the mechanisms behind causal effects. Causal…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-07 Senan Hogan-Hennessy

Causal mediation analysis is a useful tool for epidemiological research, but it has been criticized for relying on a "cross-world" independence assumption that is empirically difficult to verify and problematic to justify based on…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-02 Ryan M. Andrews , Vanessa Didelez

Mediation analysis is widely used for investigating direct and indirect causal pathways through which an effect arises. However, many mediation analysis studies are challenged by missingness in the mediator and outcome. In general, when the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-25 Shuozhi Zuo , Debashis Ghosh , Peng Ding , Fan Yang

Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical method in social and medical studies, as it can provide insights about why an intervention works and inform the development of future interventions. Currently, most causal mediation…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-01-26 Cheng Zheng , David C. Atkins , Melissa A. Lewis , Xiao-Hua Zhou

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 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,…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-28 Yuhao Deng , Haoyu Wei , Zhongzhe Ouyang

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-04 Murthy N Mittinty , Stijn Vansteelandt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Çağlar Hızlı , ST John , Anne Juuti , Tuure Saarinen , Kirsi Pietiläinen , Pekka Marttinen

Mediation analysis aims at disentangling the effects of a treatment on an outcome through alternative causal mechanisms and has become a popular practice in biomedical and social science applications. The causal framework based on…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-27 Allan Jerolon , Laura Baglietto , Etienne Birmele , Vittorio Perduca , Flora Alarcon

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-01-21 Peng Ding , Tyler J. VanderWeele

Mediation analysis seeks to infer how much of the effect of an exposure on an outcome can be attributed to specific pathways via intermediate variables or mediators. This requires identification of so-called path-specific effects. These…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-06 Johan Steen , Stijn Vansteelandt

The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Antonio Olivas-Martinez , Peter B. Gilbert , Andrea Rotnitzky

The estimation of causal effects using quasiexperiments often relies on the use of unusual or serendipitous sources of exogenous variation. When the goal is estimating the same causal effects across many different settings, the same unusual…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-26 Nick Huntington-Klein

There have been numerous publications on the advantages and disadvantages of estimating natural (pure) effects compared to controlled effects. One of the main criticisms of natural effects is that it requires an additional assumption for…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-01 Ian Shrier

Causal mediation analysis examines causal pathways linking exposures to disease. The estimation of interventional effects, which are mediation estimands that overcome certain identifiability problems of natural effects, has been advanced…

Causal mediation analysis is routinely conducted by applied researchers in a variety of disciplines. The goal of such an analysis is to investigate alternative causal mechanisms by examining the roles of intermediate variables that lie in…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-05 Kosuke Imai , Luke Keele , Teppei Yamamoto

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

Proximal causal inference was recently proposed as a framework to identify causal effects from observational data in the presence of hidden confounders for which proxies are available. In this paper, we extend the proximal causal inference…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-27 AmirEmad Ghassami , Alan Yang , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen