Debiased Front-Door Learners for Heterogeneous Effects

arXiv:2509.22531v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In observational settings where treatment and outcome share unmeasured confounders but an observed mediator remains unconfounded, the front-door (FD) adjustment identifies causal effects through the mediator. We study the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) under FD identification and introduce two debiased learners: FD-DR-Learner and FD-R-Learner. Under explicit sample-splitting, bounded-overlap, moment, and stage-learning assumptions, we show that FD-DR satisfies a product-error bound and FD-R satisfies a stage-error decomposition; these results yield conditional quasi-oracle corollaries when the relevant nuisance remainders are no larger than the target or stage oracle terms. We provide error analyses establishing this debiasedness and demonstrate robust empirical performance in synthetic studies and a real-world case study of primary seat-belt laws using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset. Together, these results indicate that the proposed learners can deliver reliable and sample-efficient HTE estimates in FD scenarios when the stated assumptions are credible. The implementation is available at https://github.com/yonghanjung/FD-CATE.