Prediction in financial domains is notoriously difficult for a number ofreasons. First, theories tend to be weak or non-existent, which makesproblem formulation open ended by forcing us to consider a large numberof independent variables and thereby increasing the dimensionality ofthe search...

In many classification tasks training data have missing feature valuesthat can be acquired at a cost. For building accurate predictive models,acquiring all missing values is often prohibitively expensive orunnecessary, while acquiring a random subset of feature values may notbe most effective....

Most induction algorithms for building predictive models take as input training data in the form of feature vectors. Acquiring the values of features may be costly, and simply acquiring all values may be wasteful or prohibitively expensive. Active feature-value acquisition (AFA) selects features...