Cumulative Natural Direct and Indirect Effects for Causal Mediation Analysis

Yuta Kawakami; Jin Tian

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arXiv · 2606.22165

Cumulative Natural Direct and Indirect Effects for Causal Mediation Analysis

Yuta Kawakami·Jin Tian

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Abstract

Causal mediation analysis provides a fundamental framework for quantifying the contributions of different pathways from a treatment $X$ to an outcome $Y$ through a mediator. The natural direct and indirect effects (NDE and NIE) are widely used to decompose the total effect. In this paper, we observe that NDE and NIE can give rise to paradoxical interpretations due to their failure to satisfy two desirable properties of interpretable causal effects: skew-symmetry and additivity. To address these limitations, we introduce new measures of direct and indirect effects for continuous treatments, termed the cumulative natural direct and indirect effects (CNDE and CNIE), constructed by decomposing local causal effects $\mathbb{E}[\partial_xY_{x}]$ into local direct and indirect effects. CNDE and CNIE yield a decomposition of the total effect that preserves both skew-symmetry and additivity. We further extend this framework to ordinal treatments by defining discrete analogues of the cumulative effects over ordered treatment levels that preserve these structural properties. We establish decomposition and identification results for the proposed measures under standard causal assumptions. We illustrate their behavior, in comparison with NDE and NIE, using canonical linear mediation models with interaction and a real-world dataset.

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Yuta Kawakami, Jin Tian. 2026-06-20. Cumulative Natural Direct and Indirect Effects for Causal Mediation Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22165

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