From Local Patterns to Global Models: Towards Domain Driven Educational Process Mining Nikola Trčka Mykola Pechenizkiy

ISDA09 - EDM Motivation What is the real curriculum (study program)? How do students really study? Is there a typical/best way to study? Do current prerequisites make sense? What is my expected time to finish? Should I take course A or course B now? … Student database with exam records ? YES/NO 80% Process: Standard techniques

Proposed approach and architecture ISDA09 - EDM Approach: Isolate a set of standard curriculum patterns and based on this patterns 1. mine the curriculum as an executable quantified formal model and analyze it, or 2.(first) manually devise a formal model of the assumed curriculum and test it against the data. Event Log - MXML format supported by ProM Typical forms of requirements in the curriculum Colored Petri net

Colored Petri nets ISDA09 - EDM

Classical Petri nets Well known and established formalism Supports all routing constructs (choice, parallelism, sequence, etc.) No explicit support for data Example - Complaints handling workflow: place transition (task) token arc

ISDA09 - EDM Colored Petri nets Extend Petri nets with data information Data in tokens - Places typed

Modeling Academic Curriculum Patterns ISDA09 - EDM

Course - Exam construct Models an exam for course C for every student id Firing of C adds a new grade to the grade list There is a maximum number of attempts ISDA09 - EDM

Start and End pattern Models courses that must be taken first Starting place of the model Graduation is always the last course Example: Start with either C1 or C2 ISDA09 - EDM

M-out-of-N pattern M courses out of a group of N courses must be passed before some other course can be taken Example: Two from {C1,C2,C3} before D ISDA09 - EDM

Dependency pattern Result of C is automatically also a result for some other (weaker) course D Firing of D adds a grade to the list for course C ISDA09 - EDM

Expiration pattern Grades stay valid only for some time, i.e. they can expire Expiration condition arbitrary Firing of GradesExpire remove all the grades of id for course C ISDA09 - EDM

Application: Conformance checking ISDA09 - EDM

Conformance checking Check whether the (manually constructed) model complies with the log (observed behavior) Has a curriculum pattern always been respected? Possible use: Fraud detection Supported in ProM for classical Petri nets ISDA09 - EDM 80%

Example 2-out-of-3 pattern check At least 2 courses from { 2Y420,2F725,2IH20 } must be taken before graduation. ISDA09 - EDM

Conclusions A framework for mining and analysis of educational data is proposed. Main idea: Model/Mine a curriculum as a Colored Petri net using some standard (predefined) patterns Applied in a real-world case study using ProM. Future work: Implement the actual mining algorithm, and enable online monitoring support. ISDA09 - EDM