Optimal Immunization Policy Using Dynamic Programming

Decisions in public health are almost always made in the context of uncertainty. Policy makers are responsible for making important decisions, faced with the daunting task of choosing from amongst many possible options. This task is called planning under uncertainty, and is particularly acute when addressing complex systems, such as issues of global health and development. Uncertainty leads to cautious or incorrect decisions that cost time, money, and human life. It is with this understanding that we pursue greater clarity on, and methods to address optimal policy making in health. Decision making under uncertainty is a challenging task, and all too often this uncertainty is averaged away to simplify results for policy makers. Our goal in this work is to implement dynamic programming which provides basis for compiling planning results into reactive strategies. We present here a description of an AI-based method and illustrate how this method can improve our ability to find an optimal vaccination strategy. We model the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process, POMDP and show how a re-active policy can be computed using dynamic programming. In this paper, we developed a framework for optimal health policy design in an uncertain dynamic setting. We apply a stochastic dynamic programming approach to identify the optimal time to change the health intervention policy and the value of decision relevant information for improving the impact of the policy.