Personalization of health interventions using cluster-based reinforcement learning

Abstract

Research has shown that personalization of health interventions can contribute to an improved effectiveness. Reinforcement learning algorithms can be used to perform such tailoring. In this paper, we present a cluster-based reinforcement learning approach which learns optimal policies for groups of users. Such an approach can speed up the learning process while still giving a level of personalization. We apply both online and batch learning to learn policies over the clusters and introduce a publicly available simulator which we have developed to evaluate the approach. The results show batch learning significantly outperforms online learning. Furthermore, near-optimal clustering is found which proves to be beneficial in learning significantly better policies compared to learning per user and learning across all users.