Diagnostic Questions:The NeurIPS 2020 Education Challenge

Digital technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in education, enabling personalized, high quality education resources to be accessible by students across the world. Importantly, among these resources are diagnostic questions: the answers that the students give to these questions reveal key information about the specific nature of misconceptions that the students may hold. Analyzing the massive quantities of data stemming from students' interactions with these diagnostic questions can help us more accurately understand the students' learning status and thus allow us to automate learning curriculum recommendations. In this competition, participants will focus on the students' answer records to these multiple-choice diagnostic questions, with the aim of 1) accurately predicting which answers the students provide; 2) accurately predicting which questions have high quality; and 3) determining a personalized sequence of questions for each student that best predicts the student's answers. These tasks closely mimic the goals of a real-world educational platform and are highly representative of the educational challenges faced today. We provide over 20 million examples of students' answers to mathematics questions from Eedi, a leading educational platform which thousands of students interact with daily around the globe. Participants to this competition have a chance to make a lasting, real-world impact on the quality of personalized education for millions of students across the world.

Interpretable Outcome Prediction with Sparse Bayesian Neural Networks in Intensive Care

Clinical decision making is challenging because of pathological complexity, as well as large amounts of heterogeneous data generated as part of routine clinical care. In recent years, machine learning tools have been developed to aid this process. Intensive care unit (ICU) admissions represent the most data dense and time-critical patient care episodes. In this context, prediction models may help clinicians determine which patients are most at risk and prioritize care. However, flexible tools such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) suffer from a lack of interpretability limiting their acceptability to clinicians. In this work, we propose a novel interpretable Bayesian neural network architecture which offers both the flexibility of ANNs and interpretability in terms of feature selection. In particular, we employ a sparsity inducing prior distribution in a tied manner to learn which features are important for outcome prediction. We evaluate our approach on the task of mortality prediction using two real-world ICU cohorts. In collaboration with clinicians we found that, in addition to the predicted outcome results, our approach can provide novel insights into the importance of different clinical measurements. This suggests that our model can support medical experts in their decision making process.