Characterizing the Effects of Environmental Exposures on Social Mobility: Bayesian Semi-parametrics for Principal Stratification

Abstract: Principal stratification provides a robust causal inference framework for the adjustment of post-treatment variables when comparing the effects of a treatment in health and social sciences. In this paper, we introduce a novel Bayesian nonparametric model for principal stratification, leveraging the dependent Dirichlet process to flexibly model the distribution of potential outcomes. By incorporating confounders and potential outcomes for the post-treatment variable in the Bayesian mixture model for the final outcome, our approach improves the accuracy of missing data imputation and allows for the characterization of treatment effects across strata defined based on the values of the post-treatment variable. We assess the performance of our method through a Monte Carlo simulation study where we compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art Bayesian method in principal stratification. Finally, we leverage the proposed method to evaluate the principal causal effects of exposure to air pollution on social mobility in the US on strata defined by educational attainment.