Bounding the probability of causality under ordinal outcomes

Abstract: The probability of causation (PC) is often used in liability assessments. In a legal context, for example, where a patient suffered the side effect after taking a medication and sued the pharmaceutical company as a result, the value of the PC can help assess the likelihood that the side effect was caused by the medication, in other words, how likely it is that the patient will win the case. Beyond the issue of legal disputes, the PC plays an equally large role when one wants to go about explaining causal relationships between events that have already occurred in other areas. This article begins by reviewing the definitions and bounds of the probability of causality for binary outcomes, then generalizes them to ordinal outcomes. It demonstrates that incorporating additional mediator variable information in a complete mediation analysis provides a more refined bound compared to the simpler scenario where only exposure and outcome variables are considered.