This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Zheng, Z. Articles by Padmanabhan, B. Search for Related Content

Selectively Acquiring Customer Information: A New Data Acquisition Problem and an Active Learning-Based Solution

A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Riverside, 18 Anderson Hall, Riverside, California 92521
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
eric.zheng{at}ucr.edu
balaji{at}wharton.upenn.edu

This paper presents a new information acquisition problem motivated by business applications where customer data has to be acquired with a specific modeling objective in mind. In the last two decades, there has been substantial work in two different fields—optimal experimental design and machine learning—that has addressed the issue of acquiring data in a selective manner with a specific objective in mind. We show that the problem presented here is different from the classic model-based data acquisition problems considered thus far in the literature in both fields. Building on work in optimal experimental design and in machine learning, we develop a new active learning technique for the information acquisition problem presented in this paper. We demonstrate that the proposed method performs well based on results from applying this method across 20 Web usage and machine learning data sets.

Key Words: selective information acquisition; active learning; data mining
History: Received: July 27, 2003;

This article has been cited by other articles:

				M. Saar-Tsechansky, P. Melville, and F. Provost Active Feature-Value Acquisition Management Science, April 1, 2009; 55(4): 664 - 684. [Abstract] [PDF]

				A. Bensoussan, R. Mookerjee, V. Mookerjee, and W. T. Yue Maintaining Diagnostic Knowledge-Based Systems: A Control-Theoretic Approach Management Science, February 1, 2009; 55(2): 294 - 310. [Abstract] [PDF]