Ran Chen, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science, has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project is titled “Taming Sequential Decision-Making with Reinforcement Learning: Non-Stationarity, Heterogeneity, and Online/Offline Comparison”.

 

Many important tasks in healthcare, business, and economics involve making a series of decisions over time, learning from each outcome to achieve long-term goals. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful tool that has been very successful in areas like robotics and video games. However, tasks involving people—such as those in healthcare and business—present unique challenges for RL. These tasks are more complicated due to changing conditions and differences among individuals and require good interpretability and stable real-time performance.   Professor Chen aims to tackle these challenges by understanding the complexities involved and developing effective methods to address them. The findings will be relevant to various fields, including healthcare (e.g., patient care, mobile health apps), business (e.g., managing operations, marketing, financial planning), and economics (e.g., public policy). Additionally, the project will combine research with education by offering students research training opportunities and integrating the results into course materials for broader learning.

 

This project is interdisciplinary in nature and will not only use techniques from reinforcement learning and general machine learning but also incorporate ideas and tools from various technical fields such as nonparametric statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. In addition, it will draw on expertise in business and healthcare.

 

Professor Chen obtained her PhD from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. She joined WashU as Assistant Professor in 2024.

 

Congratulations to Ran on receiving her NSF award just after her first year as SDS faculty at WashU!