Title
Jointly Modeling Heterogeneous Student Behaviors and Interactions among Multiple Prediction Tasks
Abstract
AbstractPrediction tasks about students have practical significance for both student and college. Making multiple predictions about students is an important part of a smart campus. For instance, predicting whether a student will fail to graduate can alert the student affairs office to take predictive measures to help the student improve his/her academic performance. With the development of information technology in colleges, we can collect digital footprints that encode heterogeneous behaviors continuously. In this article, we focus on modeling heterogeneous behaviors and making multiple predictions together, since some prediction tasks are related and learning the model for a specific task may have the data sparsity problem. To this end, we propose a variant of Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and a soft-attention mechanism. The proposed LSTM is able to learn the student profile-aware representation from heterogeneous behavior sequences. The proposed soft-attention mechanism can dynamically learn different importance degrees of different days for every student. In this way, heterogeneous behaviors can be well modeled. In order to model interactions among multiple prediction tasks, we propose a co-attention mechanism based unit. With the help of the stacked units, we can explicitly control the knowledge transfer among multiple tasks. We design three motivating behavior prediction tasks based on a real-world dataset collected from a college. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on the three prediction tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3458023
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
Keywords
DocType
Volume
LSTM, attention mechanism, heterogeneous student behaviors, multi-task learning
Journal
16
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1556-4681
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Haobing Liu122.76
Yanmin Zhu200.34
Tianzi Zang332.09
Yanan Xu483.78
Jiadi Yu537157.86
Feilong Tang600.34