Sharp sensitivity bounds for mediation under unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding.
It is often of interest to decompose the total effect of an exposure into a component that acts on the outcome through some mediator and a component that acts independently through other pathways. Said another way, we are interested in the direct and indirect effects of the exposure on the outcome. Even if the exposure is randomly assigned, it is often infeasible to randomize the mediator, leaving the mediator-outcome confounding not fully controlled. We develop a sensitivity analysis technique that can bound the direct and indirect effects without parametric assumptions about the unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding.
Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, U.S.A.
Peng
P
Ding
Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, U.S.A. , tvanderw@hsph.harvard.edu.
Tyler J
TJ
Vanderweele
Bounding factor; Causal inference; Collider; Natural direct effect; Natural indirect effect