Precision medicine is an innovative approach that aims to customize medical treatments and interventions to patients based on their individual characteristics. Several estimation techniques, including Q-learning, have been developed to determine optimal treatment rules. However, the applicability of these methods depends on the availability of precisely measured variables. This study extends the scope of Q-learning to incorporate compound outcomes, deviating from the commonly assumed univariate outcomes, and further accommodates data with mismeasurement in both binary and continuous covariates. Two methods are described to mitigate the impact of mismeasurement. Numerical studies reveal that mismeasurement in covariates leads to notable estimation bias in parameters indexing the optimal treatment, yet the methods addressing the mismeasured effects yield improved results.
Pub. online:4 Aug 2022Type:Research ArticleOpen Access
Journal:Journal of Data Science
Volume 18, Issue 3 (2020): Special issue: Data Science in Action in Response to the Outbreak of COVID-19, pp. 526–535
Abstract
COVID-19 is a disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) that was reported to spread in people in December 2019. Understanding epidemiological
features of COVID-19 is important for the ongoing global efforts to contain the virus. As a
complement to the available work, in this article we analyze the Kaggle novel coronavirus dataset
of 3397 patients dated from January 22, 2020 to March 29, 2020. We employ semiparametric
and nonparametric survival models as well as text mining and data visualization techniques to
examine the clinical manifestations and epidemiological features of COVID-19. Our analysis
shows that: (i) the median incubation time is about 5 days and older people tend to have a
longer incubation period; (ii) the median time for infected people to recover is about 20 days,
and the recovery time is significantly associated with age but not gender; (iii) the fatality rate
is higher for older infected patients than for younger patients