Temporally Coherent Clustering of Student Data

The extraction of student behavior is an important task in educational data mining. A common approach to detect similar behavior patterns is to cluster sequential data. Standard approaches identify clusters at each time step separately and typically show low performance for data that inherently suffer from noise, resulting in temporally inconsistent clusters. We propose an evolutionary clustering pipeline that can be applied to learning data, aiming at improving cluster stability over multiple training sessions in the presence of noise. Our model selection is designed such that relevant cluster evolution effects can be captured. The pipeline can be used as a black box for any intelligent tutoring system (ITS). We show that our method outperforms previous work regarding clustering performance and stability on synthetic data. Using log data from two ITS, we demonstrate that the proposed pipeline is able to detect interesting student behavior and properties of learning environments.