Educational data mining (EDM) is an emerging interdisciplinary research area that deals with the development of methods to explore data originating in an educational context. EDM uses computational approaches to analyze educational data in order to study educational questions. This paper surveys the most relevant studies carried out in this field to date. First, it introduces EDM and describes the different groups of user, types of educational environments, and the data they provide. It then goes on to list the most typical/common tasks in the educational environment that have been resolved through data-mining techniques, and finally, some of the most promising future lines of research are discussed.

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Educational Data Mining: A Review of the State of the Art

The pivotal problem of comorbidity research lies in the psychometric foundation it rests on, that is, latent variable theory, in which a mental disorder is viewed as a latent variable that causes a constellation of symptoms. From this perspective, comorbidity is a (bi)directional relationship between multiple latent variables. We argue that such a latent variable perspective encounters serious problems in the study of comorbidity, and offer a radically different conceptualization in terms of a network approach, where comorbidity is hypothesized to arise from direct relations between symptoms of multiple disorders. We propose a method to visualize comorbidity networks and, based on an empirical network for major depression and generalized anxiety, we argue that this approach generates realistic hypotheses about pathways to comorbidity, overlapping symptoms, and diagnostic boundaries, that are not naturally accommodated by latent variable models: Some pathways to comorbidity through the symptom space are more likely than others; those pathways generally have the same direction (i.e., from symptoms of one disorder to symptoms of the other); overlapping symptoms play an important role in comorbidity; and boundaries between diagnostic categories are necessarily fuzzy.

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Comorbidity: a network perspective.

http://pact.cs.cmu.edu/pubs/KLI-KoedingerCorbettPerfetti2012-pre.pdf

The Knowledge-Learning-Instruction Framework: Bridging the Science-Practice Chasm to Enhance Robust Student Learning.

A fundamental task in various disciplines of science, including biology, is to find underlying causal relations and make use of them. Causal relations can be seen if interventions are properly applied; however, in many cases they are difficult or even impossible to conduct. It is then necessary to discover causal relations by analyzing statistical properties of purely observational data, which is known as causal discovery or causal structure search. This paper aims to give a introduction to and a brief review of the computational methods for causal discovery that were developed in the past three decades, including constraint-based and score-based methods and those based on functional causal models, supplemented by some illustrations and applications.

/pdf/review-of-causal-discovery-methods-based-on-graphical-models-3doov8liuv.pdf

Review of Causal Discovery Methods Based on Graphical Models.

http://haxbylab.dartmouth.edu/publications/RHH+10.pdf

Six problems for causal inference from fMRI

We generalize Shimizu et al's (2006) ICA-based approach for discovering linear non-Gaussian acyclic (LiNGAM) Structural Equation Models (SEMs) from causally sufficient, continuous-valued observational data. By relaxing the assumption that the generating SEM's graph is acyclic, we solve the more general problem of linear non-Gaussian (LiNG) SEM discovery. LiNG discovery algorithms output the distribution equivalence class of SEMs which, in the large sample limit, represents the population distribution. We apply a LiNG discovery algorithm to simulated data. Finally, we give sufficient conditions under which only one of the SEMs in the output class is "stable".

/pdf/discovering-cyclic-causal-models-by-independent-components-akifzg28b6.pdf

Discovering cyclic causal models by independent components analysis

An important task in data analysis is the discovery of causal relationships between observed variables. For continuous-valued data, linear acyclic causal models are commonly used to model the data-generating process, and the inference of such models is a well-studied problem. However, existing methods have significant limitations. Methods based on conditional independencies (Spirtes et al. 1993; Pearl 2000) cannot distinguish between independence-equivalent models, whereas approaches purely based on Independent Component Analysis (Shimizu et al. 2006) are inapplicable to data which is partially Gaussian. In this paper, we generalize and combine the two approaches, to yield a method able to learn the model structure in many cases for which the previous methods provide answers that are either incorrect or are not as informative as possible. We give exact graphical conditions for when two distinct models represent the same family of distributions, and empirically demonstrate the power of our method through thorough simulations.

/pdf/causal-discovery-of-linear-acyclic-models-with-arbitrary-20qrg4psgx.pdf

Causal discovery of linear acyclic models with arbitrary distributions

SimStudent is a machine-learning agent that learns cognitive skills by demonstration. SimStudent was originally built as a building block for Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools to help an author build a cognitive model without significant programming. In this paper, we evaluate a second use of SimStudent, viz., student modeling for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The basic idea is to have SimStudent observe human students solving problems. It then creates a cognitive model that can replicate the students' performance. If the model is accurate, it would predict the human students' performance on novel problems. An evaluation study showed that when trained on 15 problems, SimStudent accurately predicted the human students' correct behavior on the novel problems more than 80% of the time. However, the current implementation of SimStudent does not accurately predict when the human students make errors.

Predicting Students' Performance with SimStudent: Learning Cognitive Skills from Observation

SimStudent is a machine-learning agent that learns cognitive skills by demonstration. It was originally developed as a building block of the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT), so that the authors do not have to build a cognitive model by hand, but instead simply demonstrate solutions for SimStudent to automatically generate a cognitive model. The SimStudent technology could then be used to model human students' performance as well. To evaluate the applicability of SimStudent as a tool for modeling real students, we applied SimStudent to a genuine learning log gathered from classroom experiments with the Algebra I Cognitive Tutor. Such data can be seen as the human students' "demonstrations" of how to solve problems. The results from an empirical study show that SimStudent can indeed model human students' performance. After training on 20 problems solved by a group of human students, a cognitive model generated by SimStudent explained 82% of the problem-solving steps performed correctly by another group of human students.

/pdf/evaluating-a-simulated-student-using-real-students-data-for-2yv75fkj7c.pdf

Gustavo Lacerda

Papers

Discovering cyclic causal models by independent components analysis

Causal discovery of linear acyclic models with arbitrary distributions

Causal discovery of linear acyclic models with arbitrary distributions

Predicting Students' Performance with SimStudent: Learning Cognitive Skills from Observation

Evaluating a Simulated Student Using Real Students Data for Training and Testing