Ask Less, Learn More: Adapting Ecological Momentary Assessment Survey Length by Modeling Question-Answer Information Gain

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is an approach to collect self-reported data repeatedly on mobile devices in natural settings. EMAs allow for temporally dense, ecologically valid data collection, but frequent interruptions with lengthy surveys on mobile devices can burden users, impacting compliance and data quality. We propose a method that reduces the length of each EMA question set measuring interrelated constructs, with only modest information loss. By estimating the potential information gain of each EMA question using question-answer prediction models, this method can prioritize the presentation of the most informative question in a question-by-question sequence and skip uninformative questions. We evaluated the proposed method by simulating question omission using four real-world datasets from three different EMA studies. When compared against the random question omission approach that skips 50% of the questions, our method reduces imputation errors by 15%-52%. In surveys with five answer options for each question, our method can reduce the mean survey length by 34%-56% with a real-time prediction accuracy of 72%-95% for the skipped questions. The proposed method may either allow more constructs to be surveyed without adding user burden or reduce response burden for more sustainable longitudinal EMA data collection.