Incorporating causal factors into reinforcement learning for dynamic treatment regimes in HIV.

Journal: BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising technique to solve complex sequential decision making problems in health care domains. However, existing studies simply apply naive RL algorithms in discovering optimal treatment strategies for a targeted problem. This kind of direct applications ignores the abundant causal relationships between treatment options and the associated outcomes that are inherent in medical domains.

Authors

  • Chao Yu
    Link Sense Laboratory, Nanjing Research Institute of Electronic Technology, Nanjing, China.
  • Yinzhao Dong
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, No. 2, Linggong Road, Dalian, 116024, China.
  • Jiming Liu
    Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.
  • Guoqi Ren
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, No. 2, Linggong Road, Dalian, 116024, China.