Mining Implications From Data

Item Tree Analysis (ITA) can be used to mine deterministic relationships from noisy data. In the educational domain, it has been used to infer descriptions of student knowledge from test responses in order to discover the implications between test items, allowing researchers to gain insight into the structure of the respective knowledge space. Existing approaches to ITA are computationally intense and yield results of limited accuracy, constraining the use of ITA to small datasets. We present work in progress towards an improved method that allows for efficient approximate ITA, enabling the use of ITA on larger data sets. Experimental results show that our method performs comparably to or better than existing approaches.