NEWS.md

In nhejazi/medoutcon: Efficient Natural and Interventional Causal Mediation Analysis

medoutcon 0.2.4

• Updated required versions of some dependencies to their most recent stable versions, including hal9001 (v0.4.6) and sl3 (v1.4.5).

medoutcon 0.2.3

• Added a new named argument cv_strat to est_onestep() and est_tml() and to the estimator_args list-argument in medoutcon(), which allows for stratified folds to be generated for cross-fitting (by passing these to the strata_ids argument of make_folds() from the origami package). This is also triggered by an override in est_onestep() and est_tml() when the proportion of detected cases is less than 0.1, a heuristic for rare outcomes.
• Increased the default number of folds for cross-fitting from 5 to 10, setting cv_folds = 10L in named arguments to est_onestep() and est_tml() and to the estimator_args list-argument in medoutcon().
• Changed default propensity score truncation bounds specified in g_bounds to c(0.005, 0.995) from c(0.01, 0.99) (in v0.22), based on sanity checks and manual experimentation.
• Wrapped instances of sl3_Task() in which outcome_type = "continuous" is specified in suppressWarnings() to sink warnings when the outcome variable for a given nuisance estimation task fails sl3's check for continuous-ness.

medoutcon 0.2.2

• Change iterative targeting procedures in est_tml() to use glm2::glm2 instead of stats::glm to avoid issues with erratic IRLS in the latter; see https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2011/RJ-2011-012/ for details.
• Changed default propensity score truncation bounds specified in g_bounds by an order of magnitude, from c(0.001, 0.999) to c(0.01, 0.99), to mitigate potential stability issues.

medoutcon 0.2.1

• Fixes bug in weighted TMLEs introduced during prior update to est_tml().

medoutcon 0.2.0

• Added support for a semiparametric correction for outcome-dependent two-phase sampling designs with known or estimated sampling weights.
• Tightened sanity checks for estimation of natural direct and indirect effects by requiring that EIF scores related to intermediate confounders uniformly be zero when Z = NULL is specified.
• The above required minor changes to est_tml() so as to avoid fluctuation models for the TMLE step from updating the intermediate confounder nuisance components (i.e., q_prime_Z_one, q_prime_Z_natural) and causing numerical issues that violate the above internal checks.

medoutcon 0.1.5

• For user clarity, the name of the argument for providing externally computed observation-level weights has changed (from ext_weights) to svy_weights.
• Support for the natural direct and indirect effects has been added, requiring the addition of the new internal argument effect_type across functions for estimation, including cv_eif(), est_onestep(), and est_tml(). When Z = NULL is set in medoutcon(), a natural effect estimate corresponding to the argument effect is returned instead of an interventional effect.
• The summary() and print() methods have been updated to allow handling of natural effects and counterfactual means under arbitrary contrasts.

medoutcon 0.1.0

• An initial public release of this package, version 0.1.0, which includes support for external observation-level weights.

nhejazi/medoutcon documentation built on July 16, 2025, 5:38 p.m.