Smart Testing with Vaccination: A Bandit Algorithm for Active Sampling for Managing COVID-19

This paper presents methods to proactively choose individuals to test for infection during a pandemic such as COVID-19, characterized by high contagion and presence of asymptomatic carriers. We show that by a smart integration of exploration/exploitation balancing, contact tracing, and location-based sampling, one can effectively mitigate the disease spread and significantly reduce the infection rates and death rates. Under different vaccination policies and under different compliance levels to quarantine order and/or testing requests, our smart testing algorithm can bring down the death rate significantly by 20% to 30%, as well as the percentage of infected drops by approximately 30%. The load on hospitals at peak times, a crucial aspect of managing COVID-19, drops, by 50% when implementing smart testing. We also show how procedural fairness can be incorporated into our method and present results that show that this can be done without hurting the effectiveness of the mitigation that can be achieved.

• 저널Information Systems Research · 35(1) · 120–144
• 토픽Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research · Management Science and Operations Research
• DOI10.1287/isre.2023.1215
• 저자Yingfei Wang, Inbal Yahav, Balaji Padmanabhan