Assessing the Impact of Context Inference Error and Partial Observability on RL Methods for Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions

Karine Karine, Predrag Klasnja, Susan Murphy, Benjamin Marlin

Keywords: Reinforcement learning, partial observability, context inference, adaptive interventions, mobile health, empirical evaluation

TL;DR: We study the impact of context inference error and partial observability on policy learning for adaptive health interventions.

Abstract: Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs) are a class of personalized health interventions developed within the behavioral science community. JITAIs aim to provide the right type and amount of support by iteratively selecting a sequence of intervention options from a pre-defined set of components in response to each individual's time varying state. In this work, we explore the application of reinforcement learning methods to the problem of learning intervention option selection policies. We study the effect of context inference error and partial observability on the ability to learn effective policies. Our results show that the propagation of uncertainty from context inferences is critical to improving intervention efficacy as context uncertainty increases, while policy gradient algorithms can provide remarkable robustness to partially observed behavioral state information.