Energy Balancing Weights for Mediation Analysis
Causal mediation analysis requires reconstruction of counterfactual distributions to estimate natural direct and indirect effects. Inverse probability weighting estimators rely on models for treatment assignment and mediator density ratios, whereas moment balancing approaches require researchers to specify in advance which functions of the covariates and mediators should be balanced. We propose Energy Balancing Weights for Mediation Analysis (EBWMA), which targets the joint mediator-covariate distribution used to identify counterfactual means such as E[Y(1, M(0))]. Under standard identification conditions for natural effects, EBWMA constructs weights whose weighted empirical distribution approximates this target, without modeling treatment assignment, mediator density ratios, or the outcome regression. The weights minimize energy distance through two quadratic programming problems solved sequentially. In simulations with nonlinearly transformed, skewed, or binary covariates and nonlinear mediator and outcome models, EBWMA generally achieved favorable bias and root mean squared error, with uniformly lower Monte Carlo variability than gradient boosting-based inverse probability weighting and moment balancing weights. In an illustrative analysis of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I Epidemiologic Follow-up Study, EBWMA gave the smallest standardized mean differences for most covariates and for the mediator.