SemiHAR: Improving Semisupervised Human Activity Recognition via Multitask Learning

Semisupervised human activity recognition (SemiHAR) has attracted attention in recent years from various domains, such as digital health and ambient intelligence. Currently, it still faces two challenges. For one thing, discriminative features may exist among multiple sequences rather than a single sequence since activities are combinations of motions involving several body parts. For another thing, labeled data and unlabeled data suffer from distribution discrepancies due to the different behavior patterns or biological conditions of users. For that, we propose a novel SemiHAR method based on multitask learning. First, a dimension-based Markov transition field (DMTF) technique is designed to generate 2-D activity data for capturing the interactions among different dimensions. Second, we jointly consider the user recognition (UR) task and the activity recognition (AR) task to reduce the underlying discrepancy. In addition, a task relation learner (TRL) is introduced to dynamically learn task relations, which enables the primary AR task to exploit preferred knowledge from other secondary tasks. We theoretically analyze the proposed SemiHAR and provide a novel generalization result. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that SemiHAR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Automated summary

SemiHAR is a semisupervised human activity recognition method based on multitask learning, which addresses the challenges in activity recognition through generating 2D activity data and learning task relations.