A Generalized Additive Partial-Mastery Cognitive Diagnosis Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Cárdenas-Hurtado, Camilo, Lee, Sze Ming, Chen, Yunxiao, Moustaki, Irini
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Cárdenas-Hurtado, Camilo
Lee, Sze Ming
Chen, Yunxiao
Moustaki, Irini
author_facet Cárdenas-Hurtado, Camilo
Lee, Sze Ming
Chen, Yunxiao
Moustaki, Irini
contents Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are restricted latent class models widely used to measure attributes of interest in diagnostic assessments across education, psychology, biomedical sciences, and related fields. Partial-mastery CDMs (PM-CDMs) are an important extension of CDMs. They model individuals' status for each attribute as continuous to measure partial mastery levels, thereby relaxing the restrictive discrete-attribute assumption of classical CDMs. As a result, PM-CDMs often yield better fits to real-world data and more refined measurements of the substantive attributes of interest. However, these models inherit strong parametric assumptions from traditional CDMs about item response functions and thus still face a significant risk of model misspecification. This paper proposes a generalized additive PM-CDM (GaPM-CDM) that substantially relaxes the parametric assumptions of PM-CDMs. This proposal leverages model parsimony and interpretability by modeling each item response function as a mixture of nonparametric monotone functions of attributes. A method for estimating GaPM-CDM is developed that combines the marginal maximum likelihood estimator with a sieve approximation of the nonparametric functions. The new model is applicable in both confirmatory and exploratory settings, depending on whether prior knowledge of the relationship between observed variables and attributes is available. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with PM-CDMs through extensive simulation studies and further applied to two measurement problems from educational testing and healthcare research, respectively.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20191
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Generalized Additive Partial-Mastery Cognitive Diagnosis Model
Cárdenas-Hurtado, Camilo
Lee, Sze Ming
Chen, Yunxiao
Moustaki, Irini
Methodology
Computation
Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are restricted latent class models widely used to measure attributes of interest in diagnostic assessments across education, psychology, biomedical sciences, and related fields. Partial-mastery CDMs (PM-CDMs) are an important extension of CDMs. They model individuals' status for each attribute as continuous to measure partial mastery levels, thereby relaxing the restrictive discrete-attribute assumption of classical CDMs. As a result, PM-CDMs often yield better fits to real-world data and more refined measurements of the substantive attributes of interest. However, these models inherit strong parametric assumptions from traditional CDMs about item response functions and thus still face a significant risk of model misspecification. This paper proposes a generalized additive PM-CDM (GaPM-CDM) that substantially relaxes the parametric assumptions of PM-CDMs. This proposal leverages model parsimony and interpretability by modeling each item response function as a mixture of nonparametric monotone functions of attributes. A method for estimating GaPM-CDM is developed that combines the marginal maximum likelihood estimator with a sieve approximation of the nonparametric functions. The new model is applicable in both confirmatory and exploratory settings, depending on whether prior knowledge of the relationship between observed variables and attributes is available. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with PM-CDMs through extensive simulation studies and further applied to two measurement problems from educational testing and healthcare research, respectively.
title A Generalized Additive Partial-Mastery Cognitive Diagnosis Model
topic Methodology
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20191