Reinforcement Learning in Health Care: Why It's Important and How It Can Help

At a TED Talk back in 2010, game designer and author Jane McGonigal argued that video games would help change the world for the better. While she may not have been referring to health and wellness specifically, recent developments in reinforcement learning (RL) for health care have rapidly turned parts of McGonigal's vision into reality. RL is simply a narrower subset of ML -- "the cherry on the cake" of artificial intelligence (AI), according to Facebook VP and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. The main difference is that instead of merely inspecting data, RL agents learn by interacting with their environments and earning rewards or penalties based on their actions. The agent interacts with this environment, which can change either through the agent's actions or on its own.