论文标题
可解释的用于大流行决策的AI
Interpretable AI for policy-making in pandemics
论文作者
论文摘要
自从COVID-19大流行的第一波浪潮以来,政府已经采取了限制,以减缓其扩散。但是,制定这样的政策很难,尤其是因为政府需要权衡经济损失的大流行传播。因此,经常在特殊实用模拟器的帮助下,几项作品应用了机器学习技术,以制定比政府获得的政策更有效的政策。尽管这种方法的性能是有希望的,但它们却遭受了一个基本问题:由于这种方法基于黑盒机器学习,因此它们的现实世界适用性受到限制,因为这些政策无法分析,也无法进行测试,因此它们不可信。在这项工作中,我们采用了一种最近开发的混合方法,该方法将增强学习与进化计算结合在一起,以生成可解释的政策,以遏制大流行。这些政策对现有模拟器进行了培训,旨在减少大流行的传播,同时最大程度地减少经济损失。我们的结果表明,我们的方法能够找到非常简单但非常强大的解决方案。实际上,与以前的工作和政府政策相比,我们的方法的性能(在模拟场景中)要好得多。
Since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have applied restrictions in order to slow down its spreading. However, creating such policies is hard, especially because the government needs to trade-off the spreading of the pandemic with the economic losses. For this reason, several works have applied machine learning techniques, often with the help of special-purpose simulators, to generate policies that were more effective than the ones obtained by governments. While the performance of such approaches are promising, they suffer from a fundamental issue: since such approaches are based on black-box machine learning, their real-world applicability is limited, because these policies cannot be analyzed, nor tested, and thus they are not trustable. In this work, we employ a recently developed hybrid approach, which combines reinforcement learning with evolutionary computation, for the generation of interpretable policies for containing the pandemic. These policies, trained on an existing simulator, aim to reduce the spreading of the pandemic while minimizing the economic losses. Our results show that our approach is able to find solutions that are extremely simple, yet very powerful. In fact, our approach has significantly better performance (in simulated scenarios) than both previous work and government policies.