Jessica R. Golbus

Easton K. Huch, Jieru Shi, Madeline R. Abbott et al.

Mobile health leverages personalized and contextually tailored interventions optimized through bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms. In practice, however, challenges such as participant heterogeneity, nonstationarity, and nonlinear relationships hinder algorithm performance. We propose RoME, a Robust Mixed-Effects contextual bandit algorithm that simultaneously addresses these challenges via (1) modeling the differential reward with user- and time-specific random effects, (2) network cohesion penalties, and (3) debiased machine learning for flexible estimation of baseline rewards. We establish a high-probability regret bound that depends solely on the dimension of the differential-reward model, enabling us to achieve robust regret bounds even when the baseline reward is highly complex. We demonstrate the superior performance of the RoME algorithm in a simulation and two off-policy evaluation studies.

Heming Yao, Harm Derksen, Jessica R. Golbus et al.

A model's interpretability is essential to many practical applications such as clinical decision support systems. In this paper, a novel interpretable machine learning method is presented, which can model the relationship between input variables and responses in humanly understandable rules. The method is built by applying tropical geometry to fuzzy inference systems, wherein variable encoding functions and salient rules can be discovered by supervised learning. Experiments using synthetic datasets were conducted to investigate the performance and capacity of the proposed algorithm in classification and rule discovery. Furthermore, the proposed method was applied to a clinical application that identified heart failure patients that would benefit from advanced therapies such as heart transplant or durable mechanical circulatory support. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieved great performance on the classification tasks. In addition to learning humanly understandable rules from the dataset, existing fuzzy domain knowledge can be easily transferred into the network and used to facilitate model training. From our results, the proposed model and the ability of learning existing domain knowledge can significantly improve the model generalizability. The characteristics of the proposed network make it promising in applications requiring model reliability and justification.