User-Dependent Aspect Model for Collaborative Activity Recognition

Abstract

Activity recognition aims to discover one or more users’ actions and goals based on sensor readings. In the real world, a single user’s data are often insufficient for training an activity recognition model due to the data sparsity problem. This is especially true when we are interested in obtaining a personalized model. In this paper, we study how to collaboratively use different users’ sensor data to train a model that can provide personalized activity recognition for each user. We propose a user-dependent aspect model for this collaborative activity recognition task. Our model introduces user aspect variables to capture the user grouping information, so that a target user can also benefit from her similar users in the same group to train the recognition model. In this way, we can greatly reduce the need for much valuable and expensive labeled data required in training the recognition model for each user. Our model is also capable of incorporating time information and handling new user in activity recognition. We evaluate our model on a real-world WiFi data set obtained from an indoor environment, and show that the proposed model can outperform several state-of-art baseline algorithms.