Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series

Biostatistics Student Research Forum:

Optimal Decision Making Under Uncertainty: An Application to Disease Outbreaks

Sandya Lakkur, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Biostatistics

Vanderbilt University, School of Medicine

Optimal decision-making under uncertainty is becoming increasingly important to apply in the management of disease outbreaks. Optimal decisions are determined using a decision analysis framework. This framework often suffers from the “curse of dimensionality” in large decision spaces. Thus a machine learning method, reinforcement learning, can be used to navigate more complex decision problems. We will discuss decision analysis and reinforcement learning in further detail to understand how it can be applied to management of disease outbreaks. Preliminary work regarding farm prioritization (i.e. – which farms should receive an intervention during a disease outbreak) will also be presented. These preliminary results motivate the need to make optimal decisions in a spatially explicit manner, requiring the use of reinforcement learning.