Discovering User Types: Mapping User Traits by Task-Specific Behaviors in Reinforcement Learning

Lars Lien Ankile, Brian Ham, Kevin Mao, Eura Shin, Siddharth Swaroop, Finale Doshi-Velez, Weiwei Pan

Keywords: Machine Learning, ICML, mHealth, Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: We study how to inform intervention design in mHealth applications by understanding the relationship between user traits and their behaviors.

Abstract: When assisting human users in reinforcement learning (RL), we can represent users as RL agents and study key parameters, called user traits, to inform intervention design. We study the relationship between user behaviors (policy classes) and user traits. Given an environment, we introduce an intuitive tool for studying the breakdown of ``user types": broad sets of traits that result in the same behavior. We show that seemingly different real-world environments admit the same set of user types and formalize this observation as an equivalence relation defined on environments. By transferring intervention design between environments within the same equivalence class, we can help rapidly personalize interventions.

Submission Number: 45