Reinforcement Learning for Sepsis Treatment: Baselines and Analysis

Aniruddh Raghu

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Healthcare, Baselines

Abstract: In this work, we consider the task of learning effective medical treatment policies for sepsis, a dangerous health condition, from observational data. We examine the performance of various reinforcement learning methodologies on this problem, varying the state representation used. We develop careful baselines for the performance of these methods when using different state representations, standardising the reward function formulation and evaluation methdology. Our results illustrate that simple, tabular Q-Learning and Deep Q-Learning both lead to the most effective medical treatment strategies, and that temporal encoding in the state representation aids in discovering improved policies.