Title
Optimizing Network Structure For Preventative Health
Abstract
Diseases such as heart disease, stroke, or diabetes affect hundreds of millions of people. Such conditions are strongly impacted by obesity, and establishing healthy lifestyle behaviors is a critical public health challenge with many applications. Changing health behaviors is inherently a multiagent problem since people's behavior is strongly influenced by those around them. Hence, practitioners often attempt to modify the social network of a community by adding or removing edges in ways that will lead to desirable behavior change. To our knowledge, no previous work considers the algorithmic problem of finding the optimal set of edges to add and remove. We propose the RECONNECT algorithm, which efficiently finds high-quality solutions for a range of different network intervention problems. We evaluate RECONNECT in a highly realistic simulated environment based on the Antelope Valley region in California which draws on demographic, social, and health-related data. We find the RECONNECT outperforms an array of baseline policies, in some cases yielding a 150% improvement over the best alternative.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.5555/3237383.3237507
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTONOMOUS AGENTS AND MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS (AAMAS' 18)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Preventative health, social networks, network design
Public health,Social network,Network planning and design,Computer science,Risk analysis (engineering),Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Behavior change,Network structure
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
15
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bryan Wilder13413.53
Han-Ching Ou200.34
Kayla de la Haye3133.93
Milind Tambe46008522.25