Game and Reference: Policy Combination Synthesis for Epidemic Prevention and Control

Abstract

In recent years, epidemic policy-making models are increasingly being used to provide reference for governors on prevention and control policies against catastrophic epidemics such as SARS, H1N1 and COVID-19. Existing studies are currently constrained by two issues: First, previous methods develop policies based on effect evaluation, since few of factors in real-world decision-making can be modeled, the output policies will then easily become extreme. Second, the subjectivity and cognitive limitation of human make the historical policies not always optimal for the training of decision models. To these ends, we present a novel Policy Combination Synthesis (PCS) model for epidemic policy-making. Specially, to prevent extreme decisions, we introduce adversarial learning between the model-made policies and the real policies to force the output policies to be more human-liked. On the other hand, to minimize the impact of sub-optimal historical policies, we employ contrastive learning to let the model draw on experience from the best historical policies under similar scenarios. Both adversarial and contrastive learning are adaptive based on the comprehensive effects of real policies to ensure the model always learns useful information. Extensive experiments on real-world data prove the effectiveness of the proposed model.