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The Student-$t$ distribution is widely used in statistical modeling of datasets involving outliers since its longer-than-normal tails provide a robust approach to hand such data. Furthermore, data collected over time may contain censored or…
Analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) are common in applied causal inference research. However, when outcomes are latent variables assessed via psychometric instruments such as educational tests, standard methods ignore the…
We illustrate a class of Item Response Theory (IRT) models for binary and ordinal polythomous items and we describe an R package for dealing with these models, which is named MultiLCIRT. The models at issue extend traditional IRT models…
Item response theory (IRT) models for categorical response data are widely used in the analysis of educational data, computerized adaptive testing, and psychological surveys. However, most IRT models rely on both the assumption that…
Cyberbullying is a prevalent social problem that inflicts detrimental consequences to the health and safety of victims such as psychological distress, anti-social behaviour, and suicide. The automation of cyberbullying detection is a recent…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proxy students in the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and in piloting test questions. However, to what extent these proxy students accurately emulate the behavior and…
Reliance on stereotypes is a persistent feature of human decision-making and has been extensively documented in educational settings, where it can shape students' confidence, performance, and long-term human capital accumulation. While…
Invariant Causal Prediction (Peters et al., 2016) is a technique for out-of-distribution generalization which assumes that some aspects of the data distribution vary across the training set but that the underlying causal mechanisms remain…
Evaluations of large language models (LLMs) suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors such as few-shot examples can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. Moreover, different LLMs can have…
Transfer learning refers to the promising idea of initializing model fits based on pre-training on other data. We particularly consider regression modeling settings where parameter estimates from previous data can be used as anchoring…
Adaptive learning technology solutions often use a learner model to trace learning and make pedagogical decisions. The present research introduces a formalized methodology for specifying learner models, Logistic Knowledge Tracing (LKT),…
A semi-parametric, non-linear regression model in the presence of latent variables is applied towards learning network graph structure. These latent variables can correspond to unmodeled phenomena or unmeasured agents in a complex system of…
Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are increasingly prevalent in education research, and are often regarded as a gold standard of causal inference. Two main virtues of randomized experiments are that they (1) do not suffer from…
Statistical latent class models are widely used in social and psychological researches, yet it is often difficult to establish the identifiability of the model parameters. In this paper we consider the identifiability issue of a family of…
Relationships among teachers are known to influence their teaching-related perceptions. We study whether and how teachers' advising relationships (networks) are related to their perceptions of satisfaction, students, and influence over…
Item response theory (IRT) models are a class of statistical models used to describe the response behaviors of individuals to a set of items having a certain number of options. They are adopted by researchers in social science, particularly…
Often, the data used to train ranking models is subject to label noise. For example, in web-search, labels created from clickstream data are noisy due to issues such as insufficient information in item descriptions on the SERP, query…
Item response theory (IRT) is a class of interpretable factor models that are widely used in computerized adaptive tests (CATs), such as language proficiency tests. Traditionally, these are fit using parametric mixed effects models on the…
One of the largest drivers of social inequality is unequal access to personal tutoring, with wealthier individuals able to afford it, while the majority cannot. Affordable, effective AI tutors offer a scalable solution. We focus on adaptive…