提出新方法,分析因果效应如何改变结果的完整分布。
Distributional Causal Mediation via Conditional Generative Modeling
- 用条件生成模型学习中介变量和结果的分布关系
- 通过蒙特卡洛模拟重建干预后结果分布,捕捉整体变化
- 适合关注复杂非线性因果机制的研究者
传统中介分析聚焦于结果的均值等汇总对比,可能掩盖复杂非线性因果机制带来的分布层面变化。本文提出分布式因果中介分析(DCMA),一种基于生成学习的框架,用于识别和估计通过多个中介传递的治疗效应对整个结果分布的影响。DCMA学习中介变量与结果的条件生成模型,从观测数据中恢复相关条件分布。利用识别公式,通过噪声重采样的蒙特卡洛前向模拟重建干预后结果分布,从而捕捉经典汇总效应及丰富的分布对比,如能量距离和沃尔什距离。推导出解析误差界,分解条件模型估计误差如何传播至重建的干预结果分布。数值实验和真实数据应用验证了DCMA的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mediation analysis has traditionally focused on outcome-level summary contrasts, such as mean effects, which may obscure substantial distributional changes induced by complex and nonlinear causal mechanisms. We propose Distributional Causal Mediation Analysis (DCMA), a generative learning framework for identifying and estimating treatment effects on entire outcome distributions transmitted through multiple mediators. DCMA learns conditional generative models for the mediators and the outcome, recovering the relevant conditional distributions from observational data. Leveraging the identification formulas, it reconstructs interventional outcome distributions via Monte Carlo forward simulation by noise resampling, enabling the capture of both classical summary effects and rich distributional contrasts such as energy distance and the Wasserstein distance. Analytical error bounds are derived to decompose how estimation errors in the learned conditional models propagate to the reconstructed interventional outcome distributions. The empirical effectiveness of DCMA is demonstrated through numerical experiments and real-world data applications.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。