A generative model of user activity in the Integrated Learning Design Environment

Abstract

Treball fi de màster de: Master on Intelligent and Interactive Systems

Supervisors: Vicenç Gómez and Davinia Hernández-Leo

The objective of this project has been to build a generative model of the user activity in the Integrative Learning Design Environment (ILDE) able to describe the data of different communities and which can be used for both to gain understanding about the data and to test hypothetical situations. The model that we present is called Hierarchical Multivariate Hawkes Model and works with a two layer procedure that first draws the beginning of working sessions and then fills these sessions with events of different kinds using a Multivariate Hawkes Model. In the project we first make an statistical temporal analysis of the data, to understand it and see the important features to be modeled, then we introduce the model, validate it, and show some of its applications. Through these steps it has been shown that the model is able to reproduce satisfactorily the sequences of events produced by the ILDE users and it can be easily used to tackle real problems that would be difficult to face with typical statistical tools.

The work has been carried out in the context of an internship funded by the DTIC- UPF Maria de Maetzu strategic program (MDM-2015-0502), linked to projects Ed- ucational Data Science project (EDS) and Understanding and Improving Social Interactions in Online Participation Platforms project (UISIOPP).