3 research outputs found
Offline Contextual Multi-armed Bandits for Mobile Health Interventions: A Case Study on Emotion Regulation
Delivering treatment recommendations via pervasive electronic devices such as
mobile phones has the potential to be a viable and scalable treatment medium
for long-term health behavior management. But active experimentation of
treatment options can be time-consuming, expensive and altogether unethical in
some cases. There is a growing interest in methodological approaches that allow
an experimenter to learn and evaluate the usefulness of a new treatment
strategy before deployment. We present the first development of a treatment
recommender system for emotion regulation using real-world historical mobile
digital data from n = 114 high socially anxious participants to test the
usefulness of new emotion regulation strategies. We explore a number of offline
contextual bandits estimators for learning and propose a general framework for
learning algorithms. Our experimentation shows that the proposed doubly robust
offline learning algorithms performed significantly better than baseline
approaches, suggesting that this type of recommender algorithm could improve
emotion regulation. Given that emotion regulation is impaired across many
mental illnesses and such a recommender algorithm could be scaled up easily,
this approach holds potential to increase access to treatment for many people.
We also share some insights that allow us to translate contextual bandit models
to this complex real-world data, including which contextual features appear to
be most important for predicting emotion regulation strategy effectiveness.Comment: Accepted at RecSys 202