Collaborative Research: Semiparametric and Reinforcement Learning for Precision Medicine

Precision medicine seeks to optimize the medical treatments tailored to individual characteristics, including genetic features, demographic information, environmental factors, etc. Individualized treatment rule formalizes the process of decision making that translates the patients’ information into the recommended treatment, and a dynamic treatment regime consists of the sequence of individualized treatment decisions for one or more treatment decision times.

Meanwhile, recent developments in medical imaging technologies dramatically affect disease and health studies. Biomedical imaging and imaging-guided interventions are key in the infrastructure for precision medicine. It is of great importance to developing an approach for incorporating imaging data along with other abundant information in precision medicine research.

However, the current exploration for these aforementioned abundant features in precision medicine study is far from sufficient. Motivated by this, the project targets to build the statistical analysis framework in precision medicine incorporating abundant features and provide the support of data-driven decision making, which will not enrich statistical methodological studies but provide an integrated early diagnosis tool and an informative tool to guide treatment and lifestyle intervention in health science.

In addition, the project will provide training and support for graduate students, as well as instructions in both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses.

The PIs will adapt the Q-learning, semiparametric learning, functional data analysis, and reinforcement learning frameworks to precision medicine with abundant features, including medical images, genetic features, demographic information, environmental factors, etc. Focusing on different scenarios, this research program consists of three components: (i) functional individualized treatment regime study incorporating abundant features, along with the development of a novel basis expansion tool to handle the multi-dimensional image feature; (ii) generalized functional individualized treatment regime study incorporating abundant features, which allows the response variable discrete; and (iii) functional Q-learning with abundant features, which extends the methodology to the multi-stage decision setting.

The investigators will conduct the theoretical developments, develop efficient algorithms, and implement and apply the tools to real-world data for all these components in this project. From the statistical point of view, the theoretical explorations will yield more insights into semiparametric and reinforcement learning in precision medicine with abundant features.

From the computational point of view, efficient and scalable algorithms will be developed and implemented in a form of publicly available software.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.