ProCAVIAR: Hybrid Data-Driven and Probabilistic Knowledge-Based Activity Recognition

The recognition of physical activities using sensors on mobile devices has been mainly addressed with supervised and semi-supervised learning. The state-of-the-art methods are mainly based on the analysis of the user’s movement patterns that emerge from inertial sensors data. While the literature on this topic is quite mature, existing approaches are still not adequate to discriminate activities characterized by similar physical movements. The context that surrounds the user (e.g., semantic location) could be used as additional information to significantly extend the set of recognizable activities. Since collecting a comprehensive training set with activities performed in every possible context condition is too costly, if possible at all, existing works proposed knowledge-based reasoning over ontological representation of context data to refine the predictions obtained from machine learning. A problem with this approach is the rigidity of the underlying logic formalism that cannot capture the intrinsic uncertainty of the relationships between activities and context. In this work, we propose a novel activity recognition method that combines semi-supervised learning and probabilistic ontological reasoning. We model the relationships between activities and context as a combination of soft and hard ontological axioms. For each activity, we use a probabilistic ontology to compute its compatibility with the current context conditions. The output of probabilistic semantic reasoning is combined with the output of a machine learning classifier based on inertial sensor data to obtain the most likely activity performed by the user. The evaluation of our system on a dataset with 13 types of activities performed by 26 subjects shows that our probabilistic framework outperforms both a pure machine learning approach and previous hybrid approaches based on classic ontological reasoning.