A Smoothed Q-Learning Algorithm for Estimating Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes∗

Q-learning: Flexible learning about useful utilities

Dynamic treatment regimes are fast becoming an important part of medicine, with the corresponding change in emphasis from treatment of the disease to treatment of the individual patient. Because of the limited number of trials to evaluate personally tailored treatment sequences, inferring optimal treatment regimes from observational data has increased importance. Q-learning is a popular method ...

iqLearn: Interactive Q-Learning in R.

Chronic illness treatment strategies must adapt to the evolving health status of the patient receiving treatment. Data-driven dynamic treatment regimes can offer guidance for clinicians and intervention scientists on how to treat patients over time in order to bring about the most favorable clinical outcome on average. Methods for estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes, such as Q-learning...

Supplement to “Q- and A-learning Methods for Estimating Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes”

New Statistical Learning Methods for Estimating Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes.

Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) are sequential decision rules for individual patients that can adapt over time to an evolving illness. The goal is to accommodate heterogeneity among patients and find the DTR which will produce the best long term outcome if implemented. We introduce two new statistical learning methods for estimating the optimal DTR, termed backward outcome weighted learning (B...

A Bayesian Machine Learning Approach for Optimizing Dynamic Treatment Regimes

Medical therapy often consists of multiple stages, with a treatment chosen by the physician at each stage based on the patient’s history of treatments and clinical outcomes. These decisions can be formalized as a dynamic treatment regime. This paper describes a new approach for optimizing dynamic treatment regimes that bridges the gap between Bayesian inference and existing approaches, like Q-l...