What Does History Add? Calendar Controls and Information-Timing Audits for University Trajectory Forecasting
Organizations: East China Normal University
Abstract
We audit the predictive value of historical summaries in a rule-based university trajectory simulator. Seventeen ridge specifications and persistence separate current plans, past-state and past-plan summaries, and calendar-only history-length indicators. Across training, validation and two family-held-out evaluations, we reconstruct 16,750 routes and 804,000 monthly records. On the original 40-family set, six-month history lowers six-step normalized RMSE from 0.159234 to 0.151522, but its difference from a length-only control is -0.000895 (descriptive paired 95% interval [-0.001957,0.000248]). Fixed weights on 30 families unused in identified prior tasks reproduce this pattern: 0.156480 to 0.150074 versus current-state prediction, but -0.000558 [-0.001783,0.000728] versus the length control. These uncertain comparisons do not generalize to all-history summaries, which improve on their own calendar control. Exploratory decomposition finds clearer preparation-index and funds benefits, whereas fatigue dominates the six-month model's loss and has an uncertain length-controlled benefit. Moreover, 28.20% of its six-step fatigue predictions violate the simulator's [5,90] support. We document family dependence, prior exposure, strict temporal indexing, matched recursive references and independent numerical replay. The task conditions on recorded future plans; it does not evaluate real-student forecasts, causal action effects, autonomous planning or language-model memory. This is an evaluation audit, not a new memory architecture.
Figures & tables
| Specification | 1 step | 6 steps | 12 steps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current state + plan | 0.058750 | 0.159234 | 0.191085 |
| History-1 | 0.057834 | 0.156365 | 0.187299 |
| History-3 | 0.057238 | 0.153452 | 0.183228 |
| History-6 | 0.057009 | 0.151522 | 0.180771 |
| History-12 | 0.056945 | 0.150763 | 0.178771 |
| All history | 0.057132 | 0.153006 | 0.180879 |
| Specification | 1 step | 6 steps | 12 steps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current state + plan | 0.058400 | 0.156480 | 0.186687 |
| History-6 | 0.056828 | 0.150074 | 0.176040 |
| History-12 | 0.056719 | 0.149420 | 0.174548 |
| All history | 0.056830 | 0.150692 | 0.175504 |
| Count-6 only | 0.057741 | 0.150632 | 0.180099 |
| Count-all only | 0.058286 | 0.155242 | 0.185422 |
| Set | Comparison | Step | nRMSE | 95% interval |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original | History-6 vs count-6 | 1 | -0.001008 | [-0.001138, -0.000882] |
| Original | History-6 vs count-6 | 6 | -0.000895 | [-0.001957, +0.000248] |
| Original | History-6 vs count-6 | 12 | -0.003690 | [-0.006299, -0.000782] |
| Original | All history vs count-all | 1 | -0.001507 | [-0.001667, -0.001358] |
| Original | All history vs count-all | 6 | -0.004921 | [-0.006202, -0.003696] |
| Original | All history vs count-all | 12 | -0.008966 | [-0.011098, -0.006899] |
| State group | group nRMSE | 95% interval | Family wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preparation (9) | -0.008040 | [-0.008538, -0.007556] | 40/40 |
| Fatigue | +0.001135 | [-0.002419, +0.005009] | 22/40 |
| Funds | -0.002280 | [-0.002631, -0.001939] | 39/40 |
| Specification | Strict: 1 | Strict: 6 | Strict: 12 | Wide: 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current state + plan | 31.369% | 30.786% | 31.500% | 0.137% |
| History-6 | 28.860% | 28.200% | 28.560% | 0.123% |
| Count-6 only | 30.404% | 30.414% | 32.300% | 0.089% |
| All history | 28.809% | 27.280% | 28.600% | 0.437% |
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Specification | 1 step | 6 steps | 12 steps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current state + plan | 0.058750 | 0.159234 | 0.191085 |
| History-1 | 0.057834 | 0.156365 | 0.187299 |
| History-3 | 0.057238 | 0.153452 | 0.183228 |
| History-6 | 0.057009 | 0.151522 | 0.180771 |
| History-12 | 0.056945 | 0.150763 | 0.178771 |
| All history | 0.057132 | 0.153006 | 0.180879 |