# Interpretable AI for policy-making in pandemics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04256/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Interpretable Machine Learning: Fundamental Principles and 10 Grand Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11251/) (2021)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Optimization of COVID-19 Mitigation policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10560/) (2020)
- [Building a Foundation for Data-Driven, Interpretable, and Robust Policy Design using the AI Economist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02904/) (2021)
- [Evolutionary learning of interpretable decision trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07723/) (2020)
- [Learning a Formula of Interpretability to Learn Interpretable Formulas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11170/) (2020)
- [Towards Interpretable-AI Policies Induction using Evolutionary Nonlinear Decision Trees for Discrete Action Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09521/) (2020)
- [Interpretable pipelines with evolutionarily optimized modules for RL tasks with visual inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04943/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Bridging Evolutionary Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning: A Comprehensive Survey on Hybrid Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11963/) (2024)
- [Quality Diversity Evolutionary Learning of Decision Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12758/) (2022)
- [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Methods, Applications, Visionary Prospects, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10091/) (2023)
- [The Pros and Cons of Using Machine Learning and Interpretable Machine Learning Methods in psychiatry detection applications, specifically depression disorder: A Brief Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06633/) (2023)
- [Evo* 2023 -- Late-Breaking Abstracts Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13950/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have applied restrictions in order to slow down its spreading. However, creating such policies is hard, especially because the government needs to trade-off the spreading of the pandemic with the economic losses. For this reason, several works have applied machine learning techniques, often with the help of special-purpose simulators, to generate policies that were more effective than the ones obtained by governments. While the performance of such approaches are promising, they suffer from a fundamental issue: since such approaches are based on black-box machine learning, their real-world applicability is limited, because these policies cannot be analyzed, nor tested, and thus they are not trustable. In this work, we employ a recently developed hybrid approach, which combines reinforcement learning with evolutionary computation, for the generation of interpretable policies for containing the pandemic. These policies, trained on an existing simulator, aim to reduce the spreading of the pandemic while minimizing the economic losses. Our results show that our approach is able to find solutions that are extremely simple, yet very powerful. In fact, our approach has significantly better performance (in simulated scenarios) than both previous work and government policies.