方法对比

	Negative Control Outcome Design	Four-Way Decomposition
领域	Social Epidemiology	Social Epidemiology
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	2010	2014
提出者	Marc Lipsitch, Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen & Ted Cohen; Xu Shi & Wang Miao	Tyler J. VanderWeele
类型	Falsification-and-correction pipeline for unmeasured confounding	Counterfactual decomposition pipeline for total effects
开创性文献	Lipsitch, M., Tchetgen Tchetgen, E., & Cohen, T. (2010). Negative Controls: A Tool for Detecting Confounding and Bias in Observational Studies. Epidemiology, 21(3), 383-388.	VanderWeele, T. J. (2014). A unification of mediation and interaction: a four-way decomposition. Epidemiology, 25(5), 749-761.
别名	Negative Controls, Negative Control Outcome, Negative Control Exposure, Falsification Endpoint Analysis	4-Way Decomposition, VanderWeele Four-Way Decomposition, Mediation-Interaction Decomposition, Unification of Mediation and Interaction
相关	4	3
摘要	The negative control design uses a deliberately chosen outcome (or exposure) that cannot plausibly be caused by the exposure under study, yet is subject to the same unmeasured confounding, selection, or measurement processes as the real research question. If the exposure appears to 'affect' something it cannot possibly affect, that spurious association is a signature of residual bias. Lipsitch, Tchetgen Tchetgen, and Cohen formalized this falsification logic for epidemiology in 2010, specifying the conditions a valid negative control must satisfy. Shi, Miao, and Tchetgen Tchetgen's 2020 review extended the idea from detection toward correction, showing how pairs of negative control variables underpin proximal causal inference, which can recover an unbiased effect estimate even when the confounder is never measured.	The four-way decomposition, introduced by Tyler VanderWeele in 2014, unifies the two great themes of effect analysis — mediation and interaction — into a single, exhaustive partition of a total causal effect. Any total effect of an exposure on an outcome can be split into exactly four pieces: a controlled direct effect (neither mediation nor interaction), a reference interaction (interaction but no mediation), a mediated interaction (both mediation and interaction at once), and a pure indirect effect (mediation but no interaction). These four components are mutually exclusive and add up to the total effect, and they nest the familiar two-way and three-way decompositions as special cases. Formalized in counterfactual notation and developed at book length in VanderWeele's 2015 Explanation in Causal Inference, the method gives social epidemiologists a precise vocabulary for asking how much of an exposure's effect runs through a mediator, how much depends on the exposure and mediator acting together, and how much is direct.