# Dynamic Feature Acquisition with Arbitrary Conditional Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07701/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Evaluation of Active Feature Acquisition Methods for Time-varying Feature Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01530/) (2023)
- [Stochastic Encodings for Active Feature Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01957/) (2025)
- [Evaluation of Active Feature Acquisition Methods for Static Feature Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03619/) (2023)
- [Generator Assisted Mixture of Experts For Feature Acquisition in Batch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12574/) (2023)
- [MINT: A wrapper to make multi-modal and multi-image AI models interactive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12032/) (2024)
- [Towards Cost Sensitive Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03892/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many real-world situations allow for the acquisition of additional relevant information when making an assessment with limited or uncertain data. However, traditional ML approaches either require all features to be acquired beforehand or regard part of them as missing data that cannot be acquired. In this work, we propose models that dynamically acquire new features to further improve the prediction assessment. To trade off the improvement with the cost of acquisition, we leverage an information theoretic metric, conditional mutual information, to select the most informative feature to acquire. We leverage a generative model, arbitrary conditional flow (ACFlow), to learn the arbitrary conditional distributions required for estimating the information metric. We also learn a Bayesian network to accelerate the acquisition process. Our model demonstrates superior performance over baselines evaluated in multiple settings.