arXiv subjects

Susan Murphy

Publications and source records attributed to Susan Murphy.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Fast Physical Activity Suggestions: Efficient Hyperparameter Learning in Mobile Health

Users can be supported to adopt healthy behaviors, such as regular physical activity, via relevant and timely suggestions on their mobile devices. Recently, reinforcement learning algorithms have been found to be effective for learning the optimal context under which to provide suggestions. However, these algorithms are not necessarily designed for the constraints posed by mobile health (mHealth) settings, that they be efficient, domain-informed and computationally affordable. We propose an algorithm for providing physical activity suggestions in mHealth settings. Using domain-science, we formulate a contextual bandit algorithm which makes use of a linear mixed effects model. We then introduce a procedure to efficiently perform hyper-parameter updating, using far less computational resources than competing approaches. Not only is our approach computationally efficient, it is also easily implemented with closed form matrix algebraic updates and we show improvements over state of the art approaches both in speed and accuracy of up to 99% and 56% respectively.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

IntelligentPooling: Practical Thompson Sampling for mHealth

In mobile health (mHealth) smart devices deliver behavioral treatments repeatedly over time to a user with the goal of helping the user adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. Reinforcement learning appears ideal for learning how to optimally make these sequential treatment decisions. However, significant challenges must be overcome before reinforcement learning can be effectively deployed in a mobile healthcare setting. In this work we are concerned with the following challenges: 1) individuals who are in the same context can exhibit differential response to treatments 2) only a limited amount of data is available for learning on any one individual, and 3) non-stationary responses to treatment. To address these challenges we generalize Thompson-Sampling bandit algorithms to develop IntelligentPooling. IntelligentPooling learns personalized treatment policies thus addressing challenge one. To address the second challenge, IntelligentPooling updates each user's degree of personalization while making use of available data on other users to speed up learning. Lastly, IntelligentPooling allows responsivity to vary as a function of a user's time since beginning treatment, thus addressing challenge three. We show that IntelligentPooling achieves an average of 26% lower regret than state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the promise of this approach and its ability to learn from even a small group of users in a live clinical trial.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Off-Policy Estimation of Long-Term Average Outcomes with Applications to Mobile Health

Due to the recent advancements in wearables and sensing technology, health scientists are increasingly developing mobile health (mHealth) interventions. In mHealth interventions, mobile devices are used to deliver treatment to individuals as they go about their daily lives. These treatments are generally designed to impact a near time, proximal outcome such as stress or physical activity. The mHealth intervention policies, often called just-in-time adaptive interventions, are decision rules that map an individual's current state (e.g., individual's past behaviors as well as current observations of time, location, social activity, stress and urges to smoke) to a particular treatment at each of many time points. The vast majority of current mHealth interventions deploy expert-derived policies. In this paper, we provide an approach for conducting inference about the performance of one or more such policies using historical data collected under a possibly different policy. Our measure of performance is the average of proximal outcomes over a long time period should the particular mHealth policy be followed. We provide an estimator as well as confidence intervals. This work is motivated by HeartSteps, an mHealth physical activity intervention.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Translating Behavioral Theory into Technological Interventions: Case Study of an mHealth App to Increase Self-reporting of Substance-Use Related Data

Mobile health (mHealth) applications are a powerful medium for providing behavioral interventions, and systematic reviews suggest that theory-based interventions are more effective. However, how exactly theoretical concepts should be translated into features of technological interventions is often not clear. There is a gulf between the abstract nature of psychological theory and the concreteness of the designs needed to build health technologies. In this paper, we use SARA, a mobile app we developed to support substance-use research among adolescents and young adults, as a case study of a process of translating behavioral theory into mHealth intervention design. SARA was designed to increase adherence to daily self-report in longitudinal epidemiological studies. To achieve this goal, we implemented a number of constructs from the operant conditioning theory. We describe our design process and discuss how we operationalized theoretical constructs in the light of design constraints, user feedback, and empirical data from four formative studies.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Rapidly Personalizing Mobile Health Treatment Policies with Limited Data

In mobile health (mHealth), reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt to one's context without learning personalized policies might fail to distinguish between the needs of individuals. Yet the high amount of noise due to the in situ delivery of mHealth interventions can cripple the ability of an algorithm to learn when given access to only a single user's data, making personalization challenging. We present IntelligentPooling, which learns personalized policies via an adaptive, principled use of other users' data. We show that IntelligentPooling achieves an average of 26% lower regret than state-of-the-art across all generative models. Additionally, we inspect the behavior of this approach in a live clinical trial, demonstrating its ability to learn from even a small group of users.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Personalized HeartSteps: A Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Optimizing Physical Activity

With the recent evolution of mobile health technologies, health scientists are increasingly interested in developing just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs), typically delivered via notification on mobile device and designed to help the user prevent negative health outcomes and promote the adoption and maintenance of healthy behaviors. A JITAI involves a sequence of decision rules (i.e., treatment policy) that takes the user's current context as input and specifies whether and what type of an intervention should be provided at the moment. In this paper, we develop a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm that continuously learns and improves the treatment policy embedded in the JITAI as the data is being collected from the user. This work is motivated by our collaboration on designing the RL algorithm in HeartSteps V2 based on data from HeartSteps V1. HeartSteps is a physical activity mobile health application. The RL algorithm developed in this paper is being used in HeartSteps V2 to decide, five times per day, whether to deliver a context-tailored activity suggestion.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Personalizing Intervention Probabilities By Pooling

In many mobile health interventions, treatments should only be delivered in a particular context, for example when a user is currently stressed, walking or sedentary. Even in an optimal context, concerns about user burden can restrict which treatments are sent. To diffuse the treatment delivery over times when a user is in a desired context, it is critical to predict the future number of times the context will occur. The focus of this paper is on whether personalization can improve predictions in these settings. Though the variance between individuals' behavioral patterns suggest that personalization should be useful, the amount of individual-level data limits its capabilities. Thus, we investigate several methods which pool data across users to overcome these deficiencies and find that pooling lowers the overall error rate relative to both personalized and batch approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Action Centered Contextual Bandits

Contextual bandits have become popular as they offer a middle ground between very simple approaches based on multi-armed bandits and very complex approaches using the full power of reinforcement learning. They have demonstrated success in web applications and have a rich body of associated theoretical guarantees. Linear models are well understood theoretically and preferred by practitioners because they are not only easily interpretable but also simple to implement and debug. Furthermore, if the linear model is true, we get very strong performance guarantees. Unfortunately, in emerging applications in mobile health, the time-invariant linear model assumption is untenable. We provide an extension of the linear model for contextual bandits that has two parts: baseline reward and treatment effect. We allow the former to be complex but keep the latter simple. We argue that this model is plausible for mobile health applications. At the same time, it leads to algorithms with strong performance guarantees as in the linear model setting, while still allowing for complex nonlinear baseline modeling. Our theory is supported by experiments on data gathered in a recently concluded mobile health study.

stat.ME↗