Economical Active Feature-value Acquisition through Expected Utility Estimation Prem Melville, Maytal Saar-Tsechansky, Foster Provost, and Raymond Mooney   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Session 18: Statistical Methods II Abstract In many classification tasks training data have missing feature values that can be acquired at a cost. For building accurate predictive models, acquiring all missing values is often prohibitively expensive or unnecessary, while acquiring a random subset of feature values may not be most effective. The goal of active feature-value acquisition is to incrementally select feature values that are most cost-effective for improving the model¡¦s accuracy. We present an approach that acquires feature values for inducing a classification model based on an estimation of the expected improvement in model accuracy per unit cost. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces the cost of producing a model of a desired accuracy compared to random feature acquisitions. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery