An exploratory analysis of the latent structure of process data via action sequence autoencoders

Computer simulations have become a popular tool for assessing complex skills such as problem-solving. Log files of computer-based items record the human-computer interactive processes for each respondent in full. The response processes are very diverse, noisy, and of non-standard formats. Few generic methods have been developed to exploit the information contained in process data. In this paper we propose a method to extract latent variables from process data. The method utilizes a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder to compress response processes into standard numerical vectors. It does not require prior knowledge of the specific items and human-computer interaction patterns. The proposed method is applied to both simulated and real process data to demonstrate that the resulting latent variables extract useful information from the response processes.