A Deep Learning-Based Latent Trait Model for Forced-Choice Personality Assessment

In the era of intelligent assessment, psychometric tests are becoming increasingly important for personnel selection, career development, and mental health assessment. Forced-choice tests are common in personality assessments because they require participants to select from closely related options, lowering the risk of response distortion. However, traditional latent trait models for forced-choice tests suffer from severe computational bottlenecks in high-dimensional settings. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based cognitive diagnosis models are primarily designed for independent items in educational scenarios (predicated on absolute scoring), making them structurally maladapted to the ipsative data (relative preference comparisons) generated by forced-choice tests. To address these challenges, this study presents a deep learning-based Forced-Choice Neural Latent Trait (FCNLT) Model that overcomes the limitations of traditional models and is applicable to the three most common item block types found in forced-choice tests. To account for the unidimensionality of items, participants’ latent trait levels and item characteristics are represented as interpretable latent embeddings. FCNLT mines these features through nonlinear mapping and introduces a weighted BPR-based ranking loss to natively align with the relative-scoring nature of forced-choice data. Additionally, the monotonicity assumption is utilized to improve the interpretability of the trait estimates. The FCNLT’s effectiveness is validated by experiments on real-world and simulated datasets that show its accuracy, interpretability, and robustness.