Harmonic Loss Function for Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Based on LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks

Human activity recognition (HAR) has been a very popular field in both real practice and theoretical research. Over the years, a number of many-vs-one Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models have been proposed for the sensor-based HAR problem. However, how to utilize sequence outputs of them to improve the HAR performance has not been studied seriously. To solve this problem, we present a novel loss function named harmonic loss, which is utilized to improve the overall classification performance of HAR based on baseline LSTM networks. First, label replication method is presented to duplicate true labels at each sequence step in many-vs-one LSTM networks, thus each sequence step can generate a local error and a local output. Then, considering the importance of different local errors and inspired by the Ebbinghaus memory curve, the harmonic loss is proposed to give unequal weights to different local errors based on harmonic series equation. Additionally, to improve the overall classification performance of HAR, integrated methods are utilized to exploit the sequence outputs of LSTM models based on harmonic loss and ensemble learning strategy. Finally, based on the LSTM model construction and hyper-parameter setting, extensive experiments are conducted. A series of experimental results demonstrate that our harmonic loss significantly achieves higher macro-F1 and accuracy than strong baselines on two public HAR benchmarks. Compared with previous state-of-art methods, our proposed methods can achieve competitive classification performance.