Related papers: Bayesian Best-Arm Identification for Selecting Inf…
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid evolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the decision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at least in…
In many applications, evaluating the effectiveness of different alternatives comes with varying costs or resource usage. Motivated by such heterogeneity, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem, where…
We here adopt Bayesian nonparametric mixture models to extend multi-armed bandits in general, and Thompson sampling in particular, to scenarios where there is reward model uncertainty. In the stochastic multi-armed bandit, the reward for…
We propose a new integrated phase I/II trial design to identify the most efficacious dose combination that also satisfies certain safety requirements for drug-combination trials. We first take a Bayesian copula-type model for dose finding…
In this paper we consider robust models for emergency staff deployment in the event of a flu pandemic. We focus on managing critical staff levels at organizations that must remain operational during such an event, and develop methodologies…
We study how international flights can facilitate the spread of an epidemic to a worldwide scale. We combine an infrastructure network of flight connections with a population density dataset to derive the mobility network, and then we…
Compartmental models have long served as important tools in mathematical epidemiology, with their usefulness highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the classical models fail to account for certain features of this…
We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…
Bayesian optimization has become a popular method for high-throughput computing, like the design of computer experiments or hyperparameter tuning of expensive models, where sample efficiency is mandatory. In these applications, distributed…
Gathering labeled data to train well-performing machine learning models is one of the critical challenges in many applications. Active learning aims at reducing the labeling costs by an efficient and effective allocation of costly labeling…
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…
We introduce Box Thirding (B3), a flexible and efficient algorithm for Best Arm Identification (BAI) under fixed-budget constraints. It is designed for both anytime BAI and scenarios with large N, where the number of arms is too large for…
Mobile health (mHealth) programs face a critical challenge in optimizing the timing of automated health information calls to beneficiaries. This challenge has been formulated as a collaborative multi-armed bandit problem, requiring online…
A central challenge in every field of biology is to use existing measurements to predict the outcomes of future experiments. In this work, we consider the wealth of antibody inhibition data against variants of the influenza virus. Due to…
The transmission dynamics of an epidemic are rarely homogeneous. Super-spreading events and super-spreading individuals are two types of heterogeneous transmissibility. Inference of super-spreading is commonly carried out on secondary case…
Predicting epidemic dynamics is of great value in understanding and controlling diffusion processes, such as infectious disease spread and information propagation. This task is intractable, especially when surveillance resources are very…
Epidemic models play a key role in understanding and responding to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. Widely used compartmental models are static and are of limited use to evaluate intervention strategies with the emerging pandemic. Applying…
Epidemiological models can not only be used to forecast the course of a pandemic like COVID-19, but also to propose and design non-pharmaceutical interventions such as school and work closing. In general, the design of optimal policies…
We review research papers which use game theory to model the decision making of individuals during an epidemic, attempting to classify the literature and identify the emerging trends in this field. We show that the literature can be…
In good arm identification (GAI), the goal is to identify one arm whose average performance exceeds a given threshold, referred to as a good arm, if it exists. Few works have studied GAI in the fixed-budget setting when the sampling budget…