Weakly Supervised Multi-Task Representation Learning for Human Activity Analysis Using Wearables

Sensor data streams from wearable devices and smart environments are widely studied in areas like human activity recognition (HAR), person identification, or health monitoring. However, most of the previous works in activity and sensor stream analysis have been focusing on one aspect of the data, e.g. only recognizing the type of the activity or only identifying the person who performed the activity. We instead propose an approach that uses a weakly supervised multi-output siamese network that learns to map the data into multiple representation spaces, where each representation space focuses on one aspect of the data. The representation vectors of the data samples are positioned in the space such that the data with the same semantic meaning in that aspect are closely located to each other. Therefore, as demonstrated with a set of experiments, the trained model can provide metrics for clustering data based on multiple aspects, allowing it to address multiple tasks simultaneously and even to outperform single task supervised methods in many situations. In addition, further experiments are presented that in more detail analyze the effect of the architecture and of using multiple tasks within this framework, that investigate the scalability of the model to include additional tasks, and that demonstrate the ability of the framework to combine data for which only partial relationship information with respect to the target tasks is available.

Unsupervised Embedding Learning for Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensor Data

The embedded sensors in widely used smartphones and other wearable devices make the data of human activities more accessible. However, recognizing different human activities from the wearable sensor data remains a challenging research problem in ubiquitous computing. One of the reasons is that the majority of the acquired data has no labels. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach, which is based on the nature of human activity, to project the human activities into an embedding space in which similar activities will be located closely together. Using this, subsequent clustering algorithms can benefit from the embeddings, forming behavior clusters that represent the distinct activities performed by a person. Results of experiments on three labeled benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework and show that our approach can help the clustering algorithm achieve improved performance in identifying and categorizing the underlying human activities compared to unsupervised techniques applied directly to the original data set.

Siamese Networks for Weakly Supervised Human Activity Recognition

Deep learning has been successfully applied to human activity recognition. However, training deep neural networks requires explicitly labeled data which is difficult to acquire. In this paper, we present a model with multiple siamese networks that are trained by using only the information about the similarity between pairs of data samples without knowing the explicit labels. The trained model maps the activity data samples into fixed size representation vectors such that the distance between the vectors in the representation space approximates the similarity of the data samples in the input space. Thus, the trained model can work as a metric for a wide range of different clustering algorithms. The training process minimizes a similarity loss function that forces the distance metric to be small for pairs of samples from the same kind of activity, and large for pairs of samples from different kinds of activities. We evaluate the model on three datasets to verify its effectiveness in segmentation and recognition of continuous human activity sequences.