Deep Generative Domain Adaptation with Temporal Attention for Cross-User Activity Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces DGDATA, a novel deep generative domain adaptation method that incorporates temporal attention to improve cross-user human activity recognition by effectively aligning data distributions while considering temporal relations.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new domain adaptation technique that integrates temporal relation attention with generative models for better cross-user HAR performance.

Findings

DGDATA outperforms existing methods on three public HAR datasets.

Incorporating temporal attention improves domain alignment accuracy.

The method enhances classification performance in cross-user scenarios.

Abstract

In Human Activity Recognition (HAR), a predominant assumption is that the data utilized for training and evaluation purposes are drawn from the same distribution. It is also assumed that all data samples are independent and identically distributed ($\displaystyle i.i.d.$). Contrarily, practical implementations often challenge this notion, manifesting data distribution discrepancies, especially in scenarios such as cross-user HAR. Domain adaptation is the promising approach to address these challenges inherent in cross-user HAR tasks. However, a clear gap in domain adaptation techniques is the neglect of the temporal relation embedded within time series data during the phase of aligning data distributions. Addressing this oversight, our research presents the Deep Generative Domain Adaptation with Temporal Attention (DGDATA) method. This novel method uniquely recognises and integrates temporal relations during the domain adaptation process. By synergizing the capabilities of generative models with the Temporal Relation Attention mechanism, our method improves the classification performance in cross-user HAR. A comprehensive evaluation has been conducted on three public sensor-based HAR datasets targeting different scenarios and applications to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed DGDATA method.