Bayesian likelihood-based regression for estimation of optimal dynamic treatment regimes

Abstract

Abstract Clinicians often make sequences of treatment decisions that can be framed as dynamic treatment regimes. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian likelihood-based dynamic treatment regime model that incorporates regression specifications to yield interpretable relationships between covariates and stage-wise outcomes. We define a set of probabilistically-coherent properties for dynamic treatment regime processes and present the theoretical advantages that are consequential to these properties. We justify the likelihood-based approach by showing that it guarantees these probabilistically-coherent properties, whereas existing methods lead to process spaces that typically violate these properties and lead to modelling assumptions that are infeasible. Through a numerical study, we show that our proposed method can achieve superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods.