Probabilistic Factorial Experimental Design for Combinatorial Interventions

Divya Shyamal, Jiaqi Zhang, Caroline Uhler

Abstract: A _combinatorial intervention_, consisting of multiple treatments applied to a single unit with potential interactive effects, has substantial applications in fields such as biomedicine, engineering, and beyond. Given $p$ possible treatments, conducting all possible $2^p$ combinatorial interventions can be laborious and quickly becomes infeasible as $p$ increases. Here we introduce the _probabilistic factorial experimental design_, formalized from how scientists perform lab experiments. In this framework, the experimenter selects a dosage for each possible treatment and applies it to a group of units. Each unit independently receives a random combination of treatments, sampled from a product Bernoulli distribution determined by the dosages. Additionally, the experimenter can carry out such experiments over multiple rounds, adapting the design in an active manner. We address the optimal experimental design problem within a novel intervention model that imposes bounded-degree interactions between treatments. In the passive setting, we provide a closed-form solution for the near-optimal design. Our results prove that a dosage of $\frac{1}{2}$ for each treatment is optimal up to a factor of $1+O(\frac{\ln(n)}{n})$ for estimating any $k$-way interaction model, regardless of $k$, and imply that $O\big(kp^{3k}\ln(p)\big)$ observations are required to accurately estimate this model. For the multi-round setting, we provide a near-optimal acquisition function that can be numerically optimized. We also explore several extensions of the design problem and finally validate our findings through simulations.

Lay Summary: Many scientific and engineering problems require testing multiple treatments in combination, but trying every possible combination quickly becomes impractical as the number of treatments grows. We introduce a probabilistic approach to experimental design where each unit receives a random combination of treatments, guided by dosage levels set by the experimenter, which can be refined over multiple rounds. This method dramatically reduces the burden of manually selecting numerous combinatorial treatments while still allowing researchers to accurately estimate complex interactions between treatments, and we provide theoretical guarantees and practical algorithms to support its use.

Primary Area: Theory->Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Keywords: Experimental Design, Factorial Experiment, Combinatorial Interventions

Submission Number: 13345