Causal Mediation Analysis Leveraging Multiple Types of Summary Statistics Data

Abstract: Summary statistics of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) teach causal relationship between millions of genetic markers and tens and thousands of phenotypes. However, underlying biological mechanisms are yet to be elucidated. We can achieve necessary interpretation of GWAS in a causal mediation framework, looking to establish a sparse set of mediators between genetic and downstream variables, but there are several challenges. Unlike existing methods rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions, we tackle practical challenges within a principled summary-based causal inference framework. We analyzed the proposed methods in extensive simulations generated from real-world genetic data. We demonstrated only our approach can accurately redeem causal genes, even without knowing actual individual-level data, despite the presence of competing non-causal trails.