Path-Specific Causal Reasoning for Fairness-aware Cognitive Diagnosis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Dacao, Zhang, Kun, Wu, Le, Tian, Mi, Hong, Richang, Wang, Meng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866910472933998592
author Zhang, Dacao
Zhang, Kun
Wu, Le
Tian, Mi
Hong, Richang
Wang, Meng
author_facet Zhang, Dacao
Zhang, Kun
Wu, Le
Tian, Mi
Hong, Richang
Wang, Meng
contents Cognitive Diagnosis~(CD), which leverages students and exercise data to predict students' proficiency levels on different knowledge concepts, is one of fundamental components in Intelligent Education. Due to the scarcity of student-exercise interaction data, most existing methods focus on making the best use of available data, such as exercise content and student information~(e.g., educational context). Despite the great progress, the abuse of student sensitive information has not been paid enough attention. Due to the important position of CD in Intelligent Education, employing sensitive information when making diagnosis predictions will cause serious social issues. Moreover, data-driven neural networks are easily misled by the shortcut between input data and output prediction, exacerbating this problem. Therefore, it is crucial to eliminate the negative impact of sensitive information in CD models. In response, we argue that sensitive attributes of students can also provide useful information, and only the shortcuts directly related to the sensitive information should be eliminated from the diagnosis process. Thus, we employ causal reasoning and design a novel Path-Specific Causal Reasoning Framework (PSCRF) to achieve this goal. Specifically, we first leverage an encoder to extract features and generate embeddings for general information and sensitive information of students. Then, we design a novel attribute-oriented predictor to decouple the sensitive attributes, in which fairness-related sensitive features will be eliminated and other useful information will be retained. Finally, we designed a multi-factor constraint to ensure the performance of fairness and diagnosis performance simultaneously. Extensive experiments over real-world datasets (e.g., PISA dataset) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PSCRF.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_03064
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Path-Specific Causal Reasoning for Fairness-aware Cognitive Diagnosis
Zhang, Dacao
Zhang, Kun
Wu, Le
Tian, Mi
Hong, Richang
Wang, Meng
Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
Cognitive Diagnosis~(CD), which leverages students and exercise data to predict students' proficiency levels on different knowledge concepts, is one of fundamental components in Intelligent Education. Due to the scarcity of student-exercise interaction data, most existing methods focus on making the best use of available data, such as exercise content and student information~(e.g., educational context). Despite the great progress, the abuse of student sensitive information has not been paid enough attention. Due to the important position of CD in Intelligent Education, employing sensitive information when making diagnosis predictions will cause serious social issues. Moreover, data-driven neural networks are easily misled by the shortcut between input data and output prediction, exacerbating this problem. Therefore, it is crucial to eliminate the negative impact of sensitive information in CD models. In response, we argue that sensitive attributes of students can also provide useful information, and only the shortcuts directly related to the sensitive information should be eliminated from the diagnosis process. Thus, we employ causal reasoning and design a novel Path-Specific Causal Reasoning Framework (PSCRF) to achieve this goal. Specifically, we first leverage an encoder to extract features and generate embeddings for general information and sensitive information of students. Then, we design a novel attribute-oriented predictor to decouple the sensitive attributes, in which fairness-related sensitive features will be eliminated and other useful information will be retained. Finally, we designed a multi-factor constraint to ensure the performance of fairness and diagnosis performance simultaneously. Extensive experiments over real-world datasets (e.g., PISA dataset) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PSCRF.
title Path-Specific Causal Reasoning for Fairness-aware Cognitive Diagnosis
topic Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03064