Domain Adaption for Knowledge Tracing

With the rapid development of online education system, knowledge tracing which aims at predicting students' knowledge state is becoming a critical and fundamental task in personalized education. Traditionally, existing methods are domain-specified. However, there are a larger number of domains (e.g., subjects, schools) in the real world and the lacking of data in some domains, how to utilize the knowledge and information in other domains to help train a knowledge tracing model for target domains is increasingly important. We refer to this problem as domain adaptation for knowledge tracing (DAKT) which contains two aspects: (1) how to achieve great knowledge tracing performance in each domain. (2) how to transfer good performed knowledge tracing model between domains. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel adaptable framework, namely adaptable knowledge tracing (AKT) to address the DAKT problem. Specifically, for the first aspect, we incorporate the educational characteristics (e.g., slip, guess, question texts) based on the deep knowledge tracing (DKT) to obtain a good performed knowledge tracing model. For the second aspect, we propose and adopt three domain adaptation processes. First, we pre-train an auto-encoder to select useful source instances for target model training. Second, we minimize the domain-specific knowledge state distribution discrepancy under maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) measurement to achieve domain adaptation. Third, we adopt fine-tuning to deal with the problem that the output dimension of source and target domain are different to make the model suitable for target domains. Extensive experimental results on two private datasets and seven public datasets clearly prove the effectiveness of AKT for great knowledge tracing performance and its superior transferable ability.