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arXiv · 2602.11520

Locally Interpretable Individualized Treatment Rules for Black-Box Decision Models

Yasin Khadem Charvadeh·Katherine S. Panageas·Yuan Chen
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Abstract

Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) aim to optimize healthcare by tailoring treatment decisions to patient-specific characteristics. Existing methods typically rely on either interpretable but inflexible models or highly flexible black-box approaches that sacrifice interpretability; moreover, most impose a single global decision rule across patients. We introduce the Locally Interpretable Individualized Treatment Rule (LI-ITR) method, which combines flexible machine learning models to accurately learn complex treatment outcomes with locally interpretable approximations to construct subject-specific treatment rules. LI-ITR employs variational autoencoders to generate realistic local synthetic samples and learns individualized decision rules through a mixture of interpretable experts. Simulation studies show that LI-ITR accurately recovers true subject-specific local coefficients and optimal treatment strategies. An application to precision side-effect management in breast cancer illustrates the necessity of flexible predictive modeling and highlights the practical utility of LI-ITR in estimating optimal treatment rules while providing transparent, clinically interpretable explanations.

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BibTeXRIS

Yasin Khadem Charvadeh, Katherine S. Panageas, Yuan Chen. 2026-02-12. Locally Interpretable Individualized Treatment Rules for Black-Box Decision Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11520

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