Supervised Reinforcement Learning with Recurrent Neural Network for Dynamic Treatment Recommendation

Lu Wang (East China Normal University); Wei Zhang (East China Normal University); Xiaofeng He (East China Normal University); Hongyuan Zha (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Dynamic treatment recommendation systems based on large-scale electronic health records (EHRs) become a key to successfully improve practical clinical outcomes. Prior relevant studies recommend treatments either use supervised learning (e.g. matching the indicator signal which denotes doctor prescriptions), or reinforcement learning (e.g. maximizing evaluation signal which indicates cumulative reward from survival rates). However, none of these studies have considered to combine the benefits of supervised learning and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose Supervised Reinforcement Learning with Recurrent Neural Network (SRL-RNN), which fuses them into a synergistic learning framework. Specifically, SRL-RNN applies an off-policy actor-critic framework to handle complex relations among multiple medications, diseases and individual characteristics. The “actor’’ in the framework is adjusted by both the indicator signal and evaluation signal to ensure effective prescription and low mortality. RNN is further utilized to solve the Partially-Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) problem due to lack of fully observed states in real world applications. Experiments on the publicly real-world dataset, i.e., MIMIC-3, illustrate that our model can reduce the estimated mortality, while providing promising accuracy in matching doctors’ prescriptions.

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