Continuous-Time Decision Transformer for Healthcare Applications

Offline reinforcement learning is a promising approach for training intelligent medical agents to learn treatment policies and assist decision making in many healthcare applications, such as scheduling clinical visits and assigning dosages for patients with chronic conditions. In this paper, we investigate the potential usefulness of Decision Transformer —a new offline reinforcement learning paradigm—in medical domains where decision making in continuous time is desired. As Decision Transformer only handles discrete-time (or, turn-based) sequential decision making scenarios, we generalize it to Continuous-Time Decision Transformer that not only considers the past clinical measurements and treatments but also the timings of previous visits, and learns to suggest the timings of future visits as well as the treatment plan at each visit. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and simulators motivated by real-world medical applications demonstrate that Continuous-Time Decision Transformer is able to outperform competitors and has clinical utility in terms of improving patients’ health and prolonging their survival by learning high-performance policies from logged data generated using policies of different levels of quality.