Towards Accurate and Fair Cognitive Diagnosis via Monotonic Data Augmentation

Intelligent education stands as a prominent application of machine learning. Within this domain, cognitive diagnosis (CD) is a key research focus that aims to diagnose students' proficiency levels in specific knowledge concepts. As a crucial task within the field of education, cognitive diagnosis encompasses two fundamental requirements: accuracy and fairness. Existing studies have achieved significant success by primarily utilizing observed historical logs of student-exercise interactions. However, real-world scenarios often present a challenge, where a substantial number of students engage with a limited number of exercises. This data sparsity issue can lead to both inaccurate and unfair diagnoses. To this end, we introduce a monotonic data augmentation framework, CMCD, to tackle the data sparsity issue and thereby achieve accurate and fair CD results. Specifically, CMCD integrates the monotonicity assumption, a fundamental educational principle in CD, to establish two constraints for data augmentation. These constraints are general and can be applied to the majority of CD backbones. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to guarantee the accuracy and convergence speed of CMCD. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets showcase the efficacy of our framework in addressing the data sparsity issue with accurate and fair CD results.