The R Journal: article published in 2021, volume 13:2

cat.dt: An R package for fast construction of accurate Computerized Adaptive Tests using Decision Trees
Javier Rodríguez-Cuadrado, Juan C. Laria and David Delgado-Gómez , The R Journal (2021) 13:2, pages 123-134.

Abstract This article introduces the cat.dt package for the creation of Computerized Adaptive Tests (CATs). Unlike existing packages, the cat.dt package represents the CAT in a Decision Tree (DT) structure. This allows building the test before its administration, ensuring that the creation time of the test is independent of the number of participants. Moreover, to accelerate the construction of the tree, the package controls its growth by joining nodes with similar estimations or distributions of the ability level and uses techniques such as message passing and pre-calculations. The constructed tree, as well as the estimation procedure, can be visualized using the graphical tools included in the package. An experiment designed to evaluate its performance shows that the cat.dt package drastically reduces computational time in the creation of CATs without compromising accuracy.

Received: 2020-06-03; online 2021-10-19, supplementary material, (591 B)
CRAN packages: catR, mirtCAT, catIrt, Matrix, Rglpk, ggplot2
CRAN Task Views implied by cited CRAN packages: Psychometrics, Econometrics, Multivariate, NumericalMathematics, Optimization, Phylogenetics, TeachingStatistics

This article and supplementary materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

@article{RJ-2021-091,
  author = {Javier Rodríguez-Cuadrado and Juan C. Laria and David
          Delgado-Gómez},
  title = {{cat.dt: An R package for fast construction of accurate
          Computerized Adaptive Tests using Decision Trees}},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {{The R Journal}},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2021-091},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2021-091},
  pages = {123--134},
  volume = {13},
  number = {2}
}