Scalable Online Disease Diagnosis via Multi-Model-Fused Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning

For those seeking healthcare advice online, AI based dialogue agents capable of interacting with patients to perform automatic disease diagnosis are a viable option. This application necessitates efficient inquiry of relevant disease symptoms in order to make accurate diagnosis recommendations. This can be formulated as a problem of sequential feature (symptom) selection and classification for which reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have been proposed as a natural solution. They perform well when the feature space is small, that is, the number of symptoms and diagnosable disease categories is limited, but they frequently fail in assignments with a large number of features. To address this challenge, we propose a Multi-Model-Fused Actor-Critic (MMF-AC) RL framework that consists of a generative actor network and a diagnostic critic network. The actor incorporates a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) to model the uncertainty induced by partial observations of features, thereby facilitating in making appropriate inquiries. In the critic network, a supervised diagnosis model for disease predictions is involved to precisely estimate the state-value function. Furthermore, inspired by the medical concept of differential diagnosis, we combine the generative and diagnosis models to create a novel reward shaping mechanism to address the sparse reward problem in large search spaces. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets for empirical evaluations. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of diagnostic accuracy and interaction efficiency while also being more effectively scalable to large search spaces. Besides, our method is adaptable to both categorical and continuous features, making it ideal for online applications.