On the identification of individual principal stratum direct, natural direct and pleiotropic effects without cross-world independence assumptions

05/27/2019

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by   Jaffer M. Zaidi, et al.

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The analysis of natural direct and principal stratum direct effects has a controversial history in statistics and causal inference as these effects are commonly identified with either untestable cross-world independence or graphical assumptions. This paper demonstrates that the presence of individual level natural direct and principal stratum direct effects can be identified without cross-world independence assumptions. We also define a new type of causal effect, called pleiotropy, that is of interest in genomics, and provide empirical conditions to detect such an effect as well.