{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/non-parametric-efficient-causal-mediation","title":"Non-parametric efficient causal mediation with intermediate confounders","arxiv_id":"1912.09936","date":"2019-12-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Iván Díaz","Nima S. Hejazi","Kara E. Rudolph","Mark J. van der Laan"],"abstract":"Interventional effects for mediation analysis were proposed as a solution to the lack of identifiability of natural (in)direct effects in the presence of a mediator-outcome confounder affected by exposure. We present a theoretical and computational study of the properties of the interventional (in)direct effect estimands based on the efficient influence fucntion (EIF) in the non-parametric statistical model. We use the EIF to develop two asymptotically optimal, non-parametric estimators that leverage data-adaptive regression for estimation of the nuisance parameters: a one-step estimator and a targeted minimum loss estimator. A free and open source \\texttt{R} package implementing our proposed estimators is made available on GitHub. We further present results establishing the conditions under which these estimators are consistent, multiply robust, $n^{1/2}$-consistent and efficient. We illustrate the finite-sample performance of the estimators and corroborate our theoretical results in a simulation study. We also demonstrate the use of the estimators in our motivating application to elucidate the mechanisms behind the unintended harmful effects that a housing intervention had on adolescent girls' risk behavior.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1912.09936v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.09936v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"non-parametric-efficient-causal-mediation","repo_url":"https://github.com/nhejazi/medoutcon","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}