abstract
- © 2018 World Scientific Publishing Company. Recently, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become an important research area because of its wide range of applications in several domains such as health care, elder care, sports monitoring systems, etc. The use of wearable sensors - specifically the use of inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes - has become the most common approach to recognize physical activities because of their unobtrusiveness and ubiquity. Overall, the process of building a HAR system starts with a feature extraction phase and then a classification model is trained. In the work of Siirtola et al. is proposed an intermediate clustering step to find the homogeneous groups of activities. For the recognition step, an instance is assigned to one of the groups and the final classification is performed inside that group. In this work we evaluate the clustering-based approach for activity classification proposed by Siirtola with two additional improvements: automatic selection of the number of groups and an instance reassignment procedure. In the original work, they evaluated their method using decision trees on a sports activities dataset. For our experiments, we evaluated seven different classification models on four public activity recognition datasets. Our results with 10-fold Cross Validation showed that the method proposed by Siirtola with our additional two improvements performed better in the majority of cases as compared to using the single classification model under consideration. When using Leave One User Out Cross Validation (user independent model) we found no differences between the proposed method and the single classification model.