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.

翻译：在制定传染病预防策略时，政策制定者常设定具体的、以结果为导向的目标。例如，制定疫苗分配策略时，政策制定者可能希望分发疫苗，使得普查区域内至少一定比例的个体保持无病状态，并考虑区域内干扰造成的溢出效应。本文提出了评估实现预设结果导向目标的同时考虑干扰溢出效应的区块级处理策略的方法。我们的策略——最小资源阈值策略（MRTP）——建议区块内实现或超过结果目标水平所需的最小处理单元比例。我们通过使用新型非参数双重稳健损失函数的经验风险最小化来估计MRTP，随后基于超额风险界刻画了估计MRTP的统计性质。我们将该方法应用于塞内加尔的水、环境卫生和个人卫生分配政策设计，目标是将无儿童腹泻家庭比例提升至超过指定阈值。我们的策略优于竞争策略，为设计分配政策提供了新途径，尤其适用于国际发展领域的传染病防控。