Minimum Resource Threshold Policy Under Partial Interference

When developing policies for prevention of infectious diseases, policymakers often set specific, outcome-oriented targets to achieve. For example, when developing a vaccine allocation policy, policymakers may want to distribute them so that at least a certain fraction of individuals in a census block are disease-free and spillover effects due to interference within blocks are accounted for. The paper proposes methods to estimate a block-level treatment policy that achieves a pre-defined, outcome-oriented target while accounting for spillover effects due to interference. Our policy, the minimum resource threshold policy (MRTP), suggests the minimum fraction of treated units required within a block to meet or exceed the target level of the outcome. We estimate the MRTP from empirical risk minimization using a novel, nonparametric, doubly robust loss function. We then characterize statistical properties of the estimated MRTP in terms of the excess risk bound. We apply our methodology to design a water, sanitation, and hygiene allocation policy for Senegal with the goal of increasing the proportion of households with no children experiencing diarrhea to a level exceeding a specified threshold. Our policy outperforms competing policies and offers new approaches to design allocation policies, especially in international development for communicable diseases.

在制定预防传染病的政策时，政策制定者通常会设定具体、以结果为导向的目标以实现之。例如，在制定疫苗分配政策时，政策制定者可能希望将其分配，以确保至少一定比例的普查区块居民免于患病，并考虑区块内部干扰导致的溢出效应。本文提出了估算区块级治疗政策的方法，该方法旨在实现预先定义的、以结果为导向的目标，同时考虑由于干扰导致的溢出效应。我们的政策，即最低资源阈值政策（MRTP），建议在区块内达到或超过结果目标水平所需的治疗单位的最小比例。我们使用一种新颖的非参数、双重稳健损失函数，通过经验风险最小化估算MRTP。然后，我们以过剩风险界限为术语，描述了估算的MRTP的统计特性。我们将我们的方法应用于为塞内加尔设计水、卫生和卫生分配政策，目标是提高无儿童家庭腹泻比例，使其超过指定的阈值。我们的政策优于竞争政策，并为设计分配政策提供了新的方法，尤其是在国际发展中的传染性疾病领域。