Citation:
Abstract:
The declining participation of beneficiaries over time is a key concern in public health programs. A popular strategy for improving retention is to have health workers `intervene' on beneficiaries at risk of dropping out. However, the availability and time of these health workers are limited resources. As a result, there has been a line of research on optimizing these limited intervention resources using Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs). The key technical barrier to using this framework in practice lies in estimating the beneficiaries' RMAB parameters from historical data. Recent research on Decision-Focused Learning (DFL) has shown that estimating parameters that maximize beneficiaries' cumulative returns rather than predictive accuracy, is essential to good performance.
Unfortunately, these gains come at a high computational cost because of the need to solve and evaluate the RMAB in each DFL training step. Consequently, past approaches may not be sustainable for the NGOs that manage such programs in the long run, given that they operate under resource constraints. In this paper, we provide a principled way to exploit the structure of RMABs to speed up DFL by decoupling intervention planning for different beneficiaries. We use real-world data from an Indian NGO, ARMMAN, to show that our approach is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art approach while also yielding superior model performance. This enables computationally efficient solutions, giving NGOs the ability to deploy such solutions to serve potentially millions of mothers, ultimately advancing progress toward UNSDG 3.1.