Sensor-based human activity mining using Dirichlet process mixtures of directional statistical models

Abstract

We have witnessed an increasing number of activity-aware applications being deployed in real-world environments, including smart home and mobile healthcare. The key enabler to these applications is sensor-based human activity recognition; that is, recognising and analysing human daily activities from wearable and ambient sensors. With the power of machine learning we can recognise complex correlations between various types of sensor data and the activities being observed. However the challenges still remain: (1) they often rely on a large amount of labelled training data to build the model, and (2) they cannot dynamically adapt the model with emerging or changing activity patterns over time. To directly address these challenges, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric model, i.e. Dirichlet process mixture of conditionally independent von Mises Fisher models, to enable both unsupervised and semi-supervised dynamic learning of human activities. The Bayesian nonparametric model can dynamically adapt itself to the evolving activity patterns without human intervention and the learning results can be used to alleviate the annotation effort. We evaluate our approach against real-world, third-party smart home datasets, and demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art techniques in both unsupervised and supervised settings.