Debiase Mediator Discretization

Preserving causal targets when continuous mediators are discretized.

Projects
From the original target, which integrates over a continuous mediator density, to a coarsened target using finite summation, and then to a debiased coarsened target using a within-bin correction.
  • Discretizing continuous mediators in integrals simplifies computation but changes the target functional and naive discretization induces first-order bias in bin width.
  • We then propose a simple bias-reduced functional that evaluates outcome regressions at within-bin conditional means.