simpleKT: a simple but tough-to-beat baseline for knowledge tracing

We added simpleKT into our pyKT package.

The link is here and the API is here.

Original paper can be found at Liu, Zitao, et al. “simpleKT: a simple but tough-to-beat baseline for knowledge tracing.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.06881 (2023).

Title: simpleKT: A Simple But Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Knowledge Tracing

Author:Zitao Liu, Qiongqiong Liu, Jiahao Chen, Shuyan Huang, Weiqi Luo

Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students’ future performance based on their historical interactions with intelligent tutoring systems. Recently, many works present lots of special methods for applying deep neural networks to KT from different perspectives like model architecture, adversarial augmentation and etc., which make the overall algorithm and system become more and more complex. Furthermore, due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocol (Liu et al., 2022), there is no widely agreed KT baselines and published experimental comparisons become inconsistent and self-contradictory, i.e., the reported AUC scores of DKT on ASSISTments2009 range from 0.721 to 0.821 (Minn et al., 2018; Yeung & Yeung, 2018). Therefore, in this paper, we provide a strong but simple baseline method to deal with the KT task named simpleKT. Inspired by the Rasch model in psychometrics, we explicitly model question-specific variations to capture the individual differences among questions covering the same set of knowledge components that are a generalization of terms of concepts or skills needed for learners to accomplish steps in a task or a problem. Furthermore, instead of using sophisticated representations to capture student forgetting behaviors, we use the ordinary dot-product attention function to extract the time-aware information embedded in the student learning interactions. Extensive experiments show that such a simple baseline is able to always rank top 3 in terms of AUC scores and achieve 57 wins, 3 ties and 16 loss against 12 DLKT baseline methods on 7 public datasets of different domains. We believe this work serves as a strong baseline for future KT research. Code is available at https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit.