Besting the quiz master: Crowdsourcing incremental classification games

Cost-sensitive classification, where the features used in machine learning tasks have a cost, has been explored as a means of balancing knowledge against the expense of incrementally obtaining new features. We introduce a setting where humans engage in classification with incrementally revealed features: the collegiate trivia circuit. By providing the community with a web-based system to practice, we collected tens of thousands of implicit word-by-word ratings of how useful features are for eliciting correct answers. Observing humans' classification process, we improve the performance of a state-of-the art classifier. We also use the dataset to evaluate a system to compete in the incremental classification task through a reduction of reinforcement learning to classification. Our system learns when to answer a question, performing better than baselines and most human players.