Cost-optimal Sequential Testing via Doubly Robust Q-learning

arXiv:2604.11165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical decision-making often involves selecting tests that are costly, invasive, or time-consuming, motivating individualized, sequential strategies for what to measure and when to stop ascertaining. We study the problem of learning cost-optimal sequential decision policies from retrospective data, where test availability depends on prior results, inducing informative missingness. Under a sequential missing-at-random mechanism, we develop a dou