Active Feature Acquisition for Cost-Efficient Temporal Prediction with Reduced Participant Burden

arXiv:2610.07452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of pathological outcomes is a central problem in psychology. To do so, psychologists often collect intensive longitudinal data. However, in such studies, the desire to acquire a large number of variables for the sake of accurate prediction is often counteracted by the need to minimize participant burden. Acquiring more variables per occasion can yield better predictions, but having too many acquisitions increase the risk of non-response and attrition. Longitudinal Active Feature Acquisition (LAFA) is a principled approach to resolve this conundrum. Instead of requiring responses to every item at every acquisition occasion, LAFA produces a policy that seeks to optimally select dynamic subsets of items to be acquired at each timepoint while preserving our ability to forecast a specific outcome. However, existing LAFA methods are mostly based on Neural Networks (NN) that are difficult to interpret in practice. In this work, we introduce a tree distillation method for learning an interpretable policy from NN-based LAFA networks. We validated our method through both a simulation and an empirical EMA dataset on forecasting daily alcohol consumption. In both cases, we find that we can meaningfully reduce the number of items acquired at each occasion with minimal loss in accuracy. Networks (NN) that are difficult to interpret in practice. In this work, we introduce a tree distillation method for learning an interpretable policy from NN-based LAFA networks. We validated our method through both a simulation and an empirical EMA dataset on forecasting daily alcohol consumption. In both cases, we find that we can meaningfully reduce the number of items acquired at each occasion with minimal loss in accuracy.