Learning a taxonomy of predefined and discovered activity patterns

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Krishnan, Narayanan | Cook, Diane J.^; | Wemlinger, Zachary

Affiliations: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: cook@eecs.wsu.edu.

Abstract: Many intelligent systems that focus on the needs of a human require information about the activities that are being performed by the human. At the core of this capability is activity recognition. Activity recognition techniques have become robust but rarely scale to handle more than a few activities. They also rarely learn from more than one smart home data set because of inherent differences between labeling techniques. In this paper we investigate a data-driven approach to creating an activity taxonomy from sensor data found in disparate smart home datasets. We investigate how the resulting taxonomy can help analyze the relationship between classes of activities. We also analyze how the taxonomy can be used to scale activity recognition to a large number of activity classes and training datasets. We describe our approach and evaluate it on 34 smart home datasets. The results of the evaluation indicate that the hierarchical modeling can reduce training time while maintaining accuracy of the learned model.

Keywords: Activity discovery, activity recognition, hierarchical clustering

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-130230

Journal: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 621-637, 2013