Learner Behavioral Feature Refinement and Augmentation Using GANs

Da Cao, Andrew S. Lan, Weiyu Chen, Christopher G. Brinton, Mung Chiang

Abstract: Learner behavioral data (e.g., clickstream activity logs) collected by online education platforms contains rich information about learners and content, but is often highly redundant. In this paper, we study the problem of learning low-dimensional, interpretable features from this type of raw, high-dimensional behavioral data. Based on the premise of generative adversarial networks (GANs), our method refines a small set of human-crafted features while also generating a set of additional, complementary features that better summarize the raw data. Through experimental validation on a real-world dataset that we collected from an online course, we demonstrate that our method leads to features that are both predictive of learner quiz scores and closely related to human-crafted features.