Adaptive Learning Recommendation Strategy Based on Deep Q-learning

Personalized recommendation system has been widely adopted in E-learning field that is adaptive to each learner's own learning pace. With full utilization of learning behavior data, psychometric assessment models keep track of the learner's proficiency on knowledge points, and then, the well-designed recommendation strategy selects a sequence of actions to meet the objective of maximizing learner's learning efficiency. This article proposes a novel adaptive recommendation strategy under the framework of reinforcement learning. The proposed strategy is realized by the deep Q-learning algorithms, which are the techniques that contributed to the success of AlphaGo Zero to achieve the super-human level in playing the game of go. The proposed algorithm incorporates an early stopping to account for the possibility that learners may choose to stop learning. It can properly deal with missing data and can handle more individual-specific features for better recommendations. The recommendation strategy guides individual learners with efficient learning paths that vary from person to person. The authors showcase concrete examples with numeric analysis of substantive learning scenarios to further demonstrate the power of the proposed method.