Time-Invariant Features-Based Online Learning for Long-Term Notification Management: A Longitudinal Study

The increasing number of daily notifications generated by smartphones and wearable devices increases mental burdens, deteriorates productivity, and results in energy waste. These phenomena are exacerbated by emerging use cases in which users are wearing and using an increasing number of personal mobile devices, such as smartphones, smartwatches, AirPods, or tablets because all the devices can generate redundant notifications simultaneously. Therefore, in addition to distraction, redundant notifications triggered by multiple devices result in energy waste. Prior work proposed a notification management system called PASS, which automatically manipulates the occurrence of notifications based on personalized models. However, machine-learning-based models work poorly against new incoming notifications because prior work has not investigated behavior changes over time. To reduce the gap between modeling and real deployment when the model is to be used long-term, we conducted a longitudinal study with data collection over long-term periods. We collected an additional 11,258 notifications and analyzed 18,407 notifications, including the original dataset. The total study spans two years. Through a statistical test, we identified time-invariant features that can be fully used for training. To overcome the accuracy drop caused by newly occurring data, we design windowing time-invariant online learning (WTOL). In the newly collected dataset, WTOL improves the F-score of the original models based on batch learning from 44.3% to 69.0% by combining online learning and windowing features depending on time sensitivity.

Automated summary

The increasing number of notifications from smartphones and wearable devices causes mental burdens, decreases productivity, and wastes energy. Previous notification management systems have difficulty handling new notifications, hence a long-term study was conducted to investigate behavioral changes and improve accuracy through an online learning windowing method.