IRL for Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Applications in Maternal and Child Health

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Jain, Gauri, Varakantham, Pradeep, Xu, Haifeng, Taneja, Aparna, Doshi, Prashant, Tambe, Milind
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Jain, Gauri
Varakantham, Pradeep
Xu, Haifeng
Taneja, Aparna
Doshi, Prashant
Tambe, Milind
author_facet Jain, Gauri
Varakantham, Pradeep
Xu, Haifeng
Taneja, Aparna
Doshi, Prashant
Tambe, Milind
contents Public health practitioners often have the goal of monitoring patients and maximizing patients' time spent in "favorable" or healthy states while being constrained to using limited resources. Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) are an effective model to solve this problem as they are helpful to allocate limited resources among many agents under resource constraints, where patients behave differently depending on whether they are intervened on or not. However, RMABs assume the reward function is known. This is unrealistic in many public health settings because patients face unique challenges and it is impossible for a human to know who is most deserving of any intervention at such a large scale. To address this shortcoming, this paper is the first to present the use of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to learn desired rewards for RMABs, and we demonstrate improved outcomes in a maternal and child health telehealth program. First we allow public health experts to specify their goals at an aggregate or population level and propose an algorithm to design expert trajectories at scale based on those goals. Second, our algorithm WHIRL uses gradient updates to optimize the objective, allowing for efficient and accurate learning of RMAB rewards. Third, we compare with existing baselines and outperform those in terms of run-time and accuracy. Finally, we evaluate and show the usefulness of WHIRL on thousands on beneficiaries from a real-world maternal and child health setting in India. We publicly release our code here: https://github.com/Gjain234/WHIRL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08463
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IRL for Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Applications in Maternal and Child Health
Jain, Gauri
Varakantham, Pradeep
Xu, Haifeng
Taneja, Aparna
Doshi, Prashant
Tambe, Milind
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Public health practitioners often have the goal of monitoring patients and maximizing patients' time spent in "favorable" or healthy states while being constrained to using limited resources. Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) are an effective model to solve this problem as they are helpful to allocate limited resources among many agents under resource constraints, where patients behave differently depending on whether they are intervened on or not. However, RMABs assume the reward function is known. This is unrealistic in many public health settings because patients face unique challenges and it is impossible for a human to know who is most deserving of any intervention at such a large scale. To address this shortcoming, this paper is the first to present the use of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to learn desired rewards for RMABs, and we demonstrate improved outcomes in a maternal and child health telehealth program. First we allow public health experts to specify their goals at an aggregate or population level and propose an algorithm to design expert trajectories at scale based on those goals. Second, our algorithm WHIRL uses gradient updates to optimize the objective, allowing for efficient and accurate learning of RMAB rewards. Third, we compare with existing baselines and outperform those in terms of run-time and accuracy. Finally, we evaluate and show the usefulness of WHIRL on thousands on beneficiaries from a real-world maternal and child health setting in India. We publicly release our code here: https://github.com/Gjain234/WHIRL.
title IRL for Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Applications in Maternal and Child Health
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08463