Nonparametric discovery of human routines from sensor data

Abstract

People engage in routine behaviors. Automatic routine discovery goes beyond low-level activity recognition such as sitting or standing and analyzes human behaviors at a higher level (e.g., commuting to work). With recent developments in ubiquitous sensor technologies, it becomes easier to acquire a massive amount of sensor data. One main line of research is to mine human routines from sensor data using parametric topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. The main shortcoming of parametric models is that it assumes a fixed, pre-specified parameter regardless of the data. Choosing an appropriate parameter usually requires an inefficient trial-and-error model selection process. Furthermore, it is even more difficult to find optimal parameter values in advance for personalized applications. In this paper, we present a novel nonparametric framework for human routine discovery that can infer high-level routines without knowing the number of latent topics beforehand. Our approach is evaluated on public datasets in two routine domains: a 34-daily-activity dataset and a transportation mode dataset. Experimental results show that our nonparametric framework can automatically learn the appropriate model parameters from sensor data without any form of model selection procedure and can outperform traditional parametric approaches for human routine discovery tasks.