Testing Full Mediation of Treatment Effects and the Identifiability of Causal Mechanisms
处理效应完全中介与因果机制可识别性的检验
In causal analysis, understanding the causal mechanisms through which an intervention or treatment affects an outcome is often of central interest. We propose a test to evaluate (i) whether the causal effect of a treatment that is randomly assigned conditional on covariates is fully mediated by, or operates exclusively through, observed intermediate outcomes (referred to as mediators or surrogate outcomes), and (ii) whether the various causal mechanisms operating through…