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ERIC Number: ED577166
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2017-Jun
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
The Misidentified Identifiability Problem of Bayesian Knowledge Tracing
Doroudi, Shayan; Brunskill, Emma
Grantee Submission, Paper presented at the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (10th, Wuhan, China, Jun 25-27, 2017)
In this paper, we investigate two purported problems with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT), a popular statistical model of student learning: "identifiability" and "semantic model degeneracy." In 2007, Beck and Chang stated that BKT is susceptible to an "identifiability problem"--various models with different parameters can give rise to the same predictions about student performance. We show that the problem they pointed out was not an identifiability problem, and using an existing result from the identifiability of hidden Markov models, we show that under mild conditions on the parameters, BKT is actually identifiable. In the second part of the paper, we discuss a problem that has been conflated with identifiability, but which actually does arise when fitting BKT models, "semantic model degeneracy"--the model parameters that best fit the data are inconsistent with the conceptual assumptions underlying BKT. We give some intuition for why semantic model degeneracy may arise by showing that BKT models fit to data generated from alternative models of student learning can have semantically degenerate parameters. Finally, we discuss the potential implications of these insights. [This article was published in: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Wuhan, China, June 25-27, 2017 (p143-149).]
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
Authoring Institution: N/A
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305A130215; R305B150008
Author Affiliations: N/A