In Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT), examinees are given tailored tests which at each stage present questions chosen to estimate their ability accurately, based on a provisional estimate. For a brief introduction, see the Wikipedia page.

This package gives implementations of well-known approaches to CAT in Julia, which are fast enough to support interactive use when scaling to large item banks. It also provides flexible scaffolding to support new approaches to CAT as well as non-standard item banks and difficulty-ability scales.

For a more in-depth introduction to CATs, I recommend the following article (which outlines the basic definitions before introducing and R package mirtCAT) and book (which contains various topical chapters detailing different aspects of CATs).

Chalmers, R. P. (2016). Generating adaptive and non-adaptive test interfaces for multidimensional item response theory applications. Journal of Statistical Software, 71, 1-38.

van der Linden, W. J. & Glas C. A. W. (Eds.) (2010). Elements of adaptive testing. Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The package is available through Pkg. Install like so:

julia> using Pkg
julia> Pkg.add("ComputerAdaptiveTesting")

For the current development version (e.g. before filing an issue), install like so:

julia> using Pkg
julia> Pkg.add(PackageSpec(url = "https://github.com/frankier/ComputerAdaptiveTesting.jl.git"))

The main (open source software library) alternatives are catR and mirtCAT in R and catsim in Python.

Of these, mirtCAT is the most complete. At the moment, mirtCAT is more complete than ComputerAdaptiveTesting.jl. However, this package is already beginning to have some advantages in terms of flexibility:

• Flexibility in allowing the lowest level "building blocks" of the algorithm, namely optimization and integration algorithms to be freely configured and replaced, allowing various levels of speed/accuracy trade off to be reached.
• Flexibility in allowing a wide variety of item banks to be used. The architecture supports (TODO: implement) for example, item banks with parameter estimation uncertainties (e.g. from MCMC estimation) and item banks with item banks based on hierarchical modelling.

There are two long term goals for the project. The first is to allow and provide fast implementations of otherwise computationally heavy scenarios and techniques such as those with large item banks, high dimensionality or many-ply lookaheads. The second is composability with complimentary Julia packages to allow for item banks based a wide variety of ways of mixing and matching model-based and machine learning -based techniques to utilised for CATs and evaluated in a CAT setting.

You can read the documentation which also contains a number of examples.

• /docs/examples, Example code
• /docs, Documentation source code, build with Documenter.jl
• /src, Source code for the main ComputerAdaptiveTesting.jl package
• /experiments, Some experiments, benchmarks and example code. All of these are more computationally heavy than /docs/examples and may need HPC and/or patience.