Structured Learning and Decision Making for Medical Informatics

Speaker: Onur Atan
Affiliation: Ph.D. Candidate - UCLA

Abstract:  Clinicians are routinely faced with the practical challenge of integrating high-dimensional data in order to make the most appropriate (and sometimes life-saving) clinical decision from a large set of possible actions for a given patient.  Current clinical decisions continue to rely on clinical practice guidelines, which are aimed at a “representative” patient rather than an individual patient who may display other characteristics.  Unfortunately, if it were necessary to learn everything from the limited medical data, the problem would be completely intractable because of the high-dimensional feature space and large number of medical decisions.

My thesis aims to design and analyze algorithms that learn and exploit the structure in the medical data – for instance, structures among the features (relevance relations) or decisions (correlations). The proposed algorithms have much in common with the works in online and counterfactual learning literature, but unique challenges in the medical informatics lead to numerous key differences from existing state of the art literature in Machine Learning (ML) and require key innovations to deal with large number of features and treatments, heterogeneity of the patients, missing information, sequential decision-making, and so on.

Biography:  Onur Atan received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey in 2013, and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2014. His current research interests include online learning, multi-armed bandit problems, off-policy optimization and their applications in healthcare informatics. He received the UCLA Electrical Engineering Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award in 2015 and the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship in 2017.

For more information, contact Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar (mihaela@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Aug 30, 2018
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Location:
E-IV Tesla Room #53-125
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095