Mining Optimal Policies: A Pattern Recognition Approach to Model Analysis

Abstract

This project spawned from an admission control problem we were working on for a major hospital in the Boston area. We tried to incorporate various aspects of the problem in a model, which resulted in a complex optimization problem that was difficult to solve analytically. Although numerical solutions could be computed, we were looking for insights to characterize simple policies that could be used in practice. We then came up with the idea of using machine learning to analyze solutions as a mean for obtaining such insights, an idea we thought could be interesting by itself. The motivating problem is an ongoing separate work.