Exploring the Pareto front of multi-objective COVID-19 mitigation policies using reinforcement learning

Mathieu Reymond, Conor F. Hayes, Lander Willem, Roxana Radulescu, Steven Abrams , Diederik M. Roijers, Enda Howley, Patrick Mannion, Niel Hens, Ann Nowe, Pieter Libin

Research output: Unpublished contribution to conferencePoster

Abstract

Infectious disease outbreaks can have a disruptive impact on public health and societal processes. As decision making in the context of epidemic mitigation is hard, reinforcement learning provides a methodology to automatically learn prevention strategies in combination with complex epidemic models. Current research focuses on optimizing policies with respect to a single objective, such as the pathogen's attack rate. However, as the mitigation of epidemics involves distinct, and possibly conflicting, criteria (i.a., prevalence, mortality, morbidity, cost), a multi-objective decision approach is warranted to learn balanced policies. To lift this decision-making process to real-world epidemic models, we apply deep multi-objective reinforcement learning and build upon a state-of-the-art algorithm, Pareto Conditioned Networks (PCN), to learn a set of solutions that approximates the Pareto front of the decision problem. We consider the first wave of the Belgian COVID-19 epidemic, which was mitigated by a lockdown, and study different deconfinement strategies, aiming to minimize both COVID-19 cases (i.e., infections and hospitalizations) and the societal burden that is induced by the applied mitigation measures. We contribute a multi-objective Markov decision process that encapsulates the stochastic compartment model that was used to inform policy makers during the COVID-19 epidemic. We evaluate the solution set that PCN returns, and observe that it correctly learns to reduce the social burden whenever the hospitalization rates are sufficiently low. In this work, we thus demonstrate that multi-objective reinforcement learning is attainable in complex epidemiological models and provides essential insights to balance complex mitigation policies.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 19 Sep 2022
Event21st European Conference on Computational Biology - Melia Sitges, Sitges, Spain
Duration: 18 Sep 202221 Sep 2022
Conference number: 21
https://eccb2022.org/

Conference

Conference21st European Conference on Computational Biology
Abbreviated titleECCB 2022
Country/TerritorySpain
CitySitges
Period18/09/2221/09/22
Internet address

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