Clickstream data from digital learning environments offer valuable insights into students' learning behaviors, but are challenging to interpret due to their high dimensionality and granularity. Prior approaches have relied mainly on handcrafted features, expert labeling, clustering, or supervised models, therefore often lacking generalizability and scalability. In this work, we introduce ClickSight, an in-context Large Language Model (LLM)-based pipeline that interprets student clickstreams to reveal their learning strategies. ClickSight takes raw clickstreams and a list of learning strategies as input and generates textual interpretations of students' behaviors during interaction. We evaluate four different prompting strategies and investigate the impact of self-refinement on interpretation quality. Our evaluation spans two open-ended learning environments and uses a rubric-based domain-expert evaluation. Results show that while LLMs can reasonably interpret learning strategies from clickstreams, interpretation quality varies by prompting strategy, and self-refinement offers limited improvement. ClickSight demonstrates the potential of LLMs to generate theory-driven insights from educational interaction data.

Finite mixture models have been used for unsupervised learning for some time, and their use within the semi-supervised paradigm is becoming more commonplace. Clickstream data is one of the various emerging data types that demands particular attention because there is a notable paucity of statistical learning approaches currently available. A mixture of first-order continuous time Markov models is introduced for unsupervised and semi-supervised learning of clickstream data. This approach assumes continuous time, which distinguishes it from existing mixture model-based approaches; practically, this allows account to be taken of the amount of time each user spends on each webpage. The approach is evaluated, and compared to the discrete time approach, using simulated and real data.

Today's customers interact with products or brands at various stages, from brand awareness to comparison to purchase to product support and loyalty. Most marketers are focused on awareness and maybe a little on experience during comparison and loyalty. In recent years, marketing has started to delve into customer support to standardize customer experience. However, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have started to provide tools that can offer much deeper insight and actions. So, what are the true and far-reaching opportunities for marketers with AI? Imagine being able to serve every customer or potential customer at any touch point in the cycle as if there were a live salesperson there who instantly knew that person's history with the brand -- the summary of clickstream, purchase history, loyalty, support encounters and sentiment.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become popular platforms for online learning. While MOOCs enable students to study at their own pace, this flexibility makes it easy for students to drop out of class. In this paper, our goal is to predict if a learner is going to drop out within the next week, given clickstream data for the current week. To this end, we present a multi-layer representation learning solution based on branch and bound (BB) algorithm, which learns from low-level clickstreams in an unsupervised manner, produces interpretable results, and avoids manual feature engineering. In experiments on Coursera data, we show that our model learns a representation that allows a simple model to perform similarly well to more complex, task-specific models, and how the BB algorithm enables interpretable results. In our analysis of the observed limitations, we discuss promising future directions.

I also did some experimentation with GRUs and LSTMs in NLP context, where I saw LSTMs performing better than GRUs, while they need more training time. Honestly, I never tried complete variable length sequences, because of the restriction, that each batch must be the same length and some layers are not usable if you have variable sequences. I don't think the difference will be huge, at least in my data. I experimented with different sequence lengths (100, 200, 250, 400, 500), and 400 and 500 have not performed better then 250. I did indeed achieve a noticeable performance improvement with embeddings, instead of one hot encoding.