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Sequential Cost-Sensitive Feature Acquisition

Machine Learning 2016-07-14 v1

Abstract

We propose a reinforcement learning based approach to tackle the cost-sensitive learning problem where each input feature has a specific cost. The acquisition process is handled through a stochastic policy which allows features to be acquired in an adaptive way. The general architecture of our approach relies on representation learning to enable performing prediction on any partially observed sample, whatever the set of its observed features are. The resulting model is an original mix of representation learning and of reinforcement learning ideas. It is learned with policy gradient techniques to minimize a budgeted inference cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method with several experiments on a variety of datasets for the sparse prediction problem where all features have the same cost, but also for some cost-sensitive settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.03691,
  title  = {Sequential Cost-Sensitive Feature Acquisition},
  author = {Gabriella Contardo and Ludovic Denoyer and Thierry Artières},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.03691},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

12 pages, conference : accepted at IDA 2016

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:53:23.827Z