On Whom Should I Perform this Lab Test Next? An Active Feature Elicitation Approach

We consider the problem of actively feature elicitation in which given a few examples with all the features (say the full EHR) and a few examples with some of the features (say demographics), the goal is to identify the set of examples on whom more information (say the lab tests) needs to be collected. The observation is that some set of features may be more expensive, personal or cumbersome to collect. We propose an active learning approach which identifies examples that are dissimilar to the ones with the full set of data and acquire the complete set of features for these examples. Motivated by real clinical tasks, our extensive evaluation on three clinical tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.