Many social programs attempt to allocate scarce resources to people with the greatest need. Indeed, public services increasingly use algorithmic risk assessments motivated by this goal. However, targeting the highest-need recipients often conflicts with attempting to evaluate the causal effect of the program as a whole, as the best evaluations would be obtained by randomizing the allocation. We propose a framework to design randomized allocation rules which optimally balance targeting high-need individuals with learning treatment effects, presenting policymakers with a Pareto frontier between the two goals. We give sample complexity guarantees for the policy learning problem and provide a computationally efficient strategy to implement it. We then collaborate with the human services department of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to evaluate our methods on data from real service delivery settings. Optimized policies can substantially mitigate the tradeoff between learning and targeting. For example, it is often possible to obtain 90% of the optimal utility in targeting high-need individuals while ensuring that the average treatment effect can be estimated with less than 2 times the samples that a randomized controlled trial would require. Mechanisms for targeting public services often focus on measuring need as accurately as possible. However, our results suggest that algorithmic systems in public services can be most impactful if they incorporate program evaluation as an explicit goal alongside targeting.
On treating right-censoring events like treatments
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute（哈佛朝圣者健康保健研究所）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Pubic Health（哈佛陈曾熙公共卫生学院）
Patient level simulation and reinforcement learning to discover novel strategies for treating ovarian cancer
Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, NYU Grossman School of Medicine（纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院维尔切克生物医学科学研究生院）；NYU Langone Health System（纽约大学朗格尼医疗系统）；Merck & Co., Inc（默克公司）；New York University（纽约大学）
