Friday January 8, 2016; 4 – 5 pm; Palmer Commons, Forum Hall

Title: Learning Treatment Policies in Mobile Health

 Abstract: We describe a sequence of steps that facilitate effective learning of treatment policies in mobile health.   These include a clinical trial with associated sample size calculator and data analytic methods.   An off-policy  Actor-Critic algorithm is developed for learning a treatment policy from this clinical trial data.

Biography: Susan Murphy is the H.E. Robbins Distinguished University Professor of Statistics & Professor of Psychiatry and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. Her research focuses on improving sequential, individualized, decision making in health, in particular on clinical trial design and data analysis to inform the development of mobile health treatment policies.  Susan is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of the College on Problems in Drug Dependence, a former editor of the Annals of Statistics, a member of the US National Academy of Medicine and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.