Diane J. Cook

Garrett Wilson, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Diane J. Cook

Increasingly, human behavior is captured on mobile devices, leading to an increased interest in automated human activity recognition. However, existing datasets typically consist of scripted movements. Our long-term goal is to perform mobile activity recognition in natural settings. We collect a dataset to support this goal with activity categories that are relevant for downstream tasks such as health monitoring and intervention. Because of the large variations present in human behavior, we collect data from many participants across two different age groups. Because human behavior can change over time, we also collect data from participants over a month's time to capture the temporal drift. We hypothesize that mobile activity recognition can benefit from unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms. To address this need and test this hypothesis, we analyze the performance of domain adaptation across people and across time. We then enhance unsupervised domain adaptation with contrastive learning and with weak supervision when label proportions are available. The dataset is available at https://github.com/WSU-CASAS/smartwatch-data

Parker Seegmiller, Joseph Gatto, Madhusudan Basak et al.

Medications often impose temporal constraints on everyday patient activity. Violations of such medical temporal constraints (MTCs) lead to a lack of treatment adherence, in addition to poor health outcomes and increased healthcare expenses. These MTCs are found in drug usage guidelines (DUGs) in both patient education materials and clinical texts. Computationally representing MTCs in DUGs will advance patient-centric healthcare applications by helping to define safe patient activity patterns. We define a novel taxonomy of MTCs found in DUGs and develop a novel context-free grammar (CFG) based model to computationally represent MTCs from unstructured DUGs. Additionally, we release three new datasets with a combined total of N = 836 DUGs labeled with normalized MTCs. We develop an in-context learning (ICL) solution for automatically extracting and normalizing MTCs found in DUGs, achieving an average F1 score of 0.62 across all datasets. Finally, we rigorously investigate ICL model performance against a baseline model, across datasets and MTC types, and through in-depth error analysis.

Parker Seegmiller, Joseph Gatto, Abdullah Mamun et al.

Prescription medications often impose temporal constraints on regular health behaviors (RHBs) of patients, e.g., eating before taking medication. Violations of such medical temporal constraints (MTCs) can result in adverse effects. Detecting and predicting such violations before they occur can help alert the patient. We formulate the problem of modeling MTCs and develop a proof-of-concept solution, ActSafe, to predict violations of MTCs well ahead of time. ActSafe utilizes a context-free grammar based approach for extracting and mapping MTCs from patient education materials. It also addresses the challenges of accurately predicting RHBs central to MTCs (e.g., medication intake). Our novel behavior prediction model, HERBERT , utilizes a basis vectorization of time series that is generalizable across temporal scale and duration of behaviors, explicitly capturing the dependency between temporally collocated behaviors. Based on evaluation using a real-world RHB dataset collected from 28 patients in uncontrolled environments, HERBERT outperforms baseline models with an average of 51% reduction in root mean square error. Based on an evaluation involving patients with chronic conditions, ActSafe can predict MTC violations a day ahead of time with an average F1 score of 0.86.

Alireza Ghods, Trong Nghia Hoang, Diane Cook

Data summarization is the process of generating interpretable and representative subsets from a dataset. Existing time series summarization approaches often search for recurring subsequences using a set of manually devised similarity functions to summarize the data. However, such approaches are fraught with limitations stemming from an exhaustive search coupled with a heuristic definition of series similarity. Such approaches affect the diversity and comprehensiveness of the generated data summaries. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce an approach to time series summarization, called Time-to-Pattern (T2P), which aims to find a set of diverse patterns that together encode the most salient information, following the notion of minimum description length. T2P is implemented as a deep generative model that learns informative embeddings of the discrete time series on a latent space specifically designed to be interpretable. Our synthetic and real-world experiments reveal that T2P discovers informative patterns, even in noisy and complex settings. Furthermore, our results also showcase the improved performance of T2P over previous work in pattern diversity and processing scalability, which conclusively demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness for time series summarization.

Garrett Wilson, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Diane J. Cook

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) provides a strategy for improving machine learning performance in data-rich (target) domains where ground truth labels are inaccessible but can be found in related (source) domains. In cases where meta-domain information such as label distributions is available, weak supervision can further boost performance. We propose a novel framework, CALDA, to tackle these two problems. CALDA synergistically combines the principles of contrastive learning and adversarial learning to robustly support multi-source UDA (MS-UDA) for time series data. Similar to prior methods, CALDA utilizes adversarial learning to align source and target feature representations. Unlike prior approaches, CALDA additionally leverages cross-source label information across domains. CALDA pulls examples with the same label close to each other, while pushing apart examples with different labels, reshaping the space through contrastive learning. Unlike prior contrastive adaptation methods, CALDA requires neither data augmentation nor pseudo labeling, which may be more challenging for time series. We empirically validate our proposed approach. Based on results from human activity recognition, electromyography, and synthetic datasets, we find utilizing cross-source information improves performance over prior time series and contrastive methods. Weak supervision further improves performance, even in the presence of noise, allowing CALDA to offer generalizable strategies for MS-UDA. Code is available at: https://github.com/floft/calda

Garrett Wilson, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Diane J. Cook

Domain adaptation (DA) offers a valuable means to reuse data and models for new problem domains. However, robust techniques have not yet been considered for time series data with varying amounts of data availability. In this paper, we make three main contributions to fill this gap. First, we propose a novel Convolutional deep Domain Adaptation model for Time Series data (CoDATS) that significantly improves accuracy and training time over state-of-the-art DA strategies on real-world sensor data benchmarks. By utilizing data from multiple source domains, we increase the usefulness of CoDATS to further improve accuracy over prior single-source methods, particularly on complex time series datasets that have high variability between domains. Second, we propose a novel Domain Adaptation with Weak Supervision (DA-WS) method by utilizing weak supervision in the form of target-domain label distributions, which may be easier to collect than additional data labels. Third, we perform comprehensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our domain adaptation and weak supervision methods. Results show that CoDATS for single-source DA significantly improves over the state-of-the-art methods, and we achieve additional improvements in accuracy using data from multiple source domains and weakly supervised signals. Code is available at: https://github.com/floft/codats

Chance N DeSmet, Diane J Cook

Synthetic data generation overcomes limitations of real-world machine learning. Traditional methods are valuable for augmenting costly datasets but only optimize one criterion: realism. In this paper, we tackle the problem of generating synthetic data that optimize multiple criteria. This goal is necessary when real data are replaced by synthetic for privacy preservation. We introduce HydraGAN, a new approach to synthetic data generation that introduces multiple generator and discriminator agents into the system. The multi-agent GAN optimizes the goal of privacy-preservation as well as data realism. To facilitate multi-agent training, we adapt game-theoretic principles to offer equilibrium guarantees. We observe that HydraGAN outperforms baseline methods for three datasets for multiple criteria of maximizing data realism, maximizing model accuracy, and minimizing re-identification risk.

Yuhui Wang, Diane J. Cook

Time series data are valuable but are often inscrutable. Gaining trust in time series classifiers for finance, healthcare, and other critical applications may rely on creating interpretable models. Researchers have previously been forced to decide between interpretable methods that lack predictive power and deep learning methods that lack transparency. In this paper, we propose a novel Mimic algorithm that retains the predictive accuracy of the strongest classifiers while introducing interpretability. Mimic mirrors the learning method of an existing multivariate time series classifier while simultaneously producing a visual representation that enhances user understanding of the learned model. Experiments on 26 time series datasets support Mimic's ability to imitate a variety of time series classifiers visually and accurately.

Yuchao Ma, Andrew T. Campbell, Diane J. Cook et al.

While activity recognition from inertial sensors holds potential for mobile health, differences in sensing platforms and user movement patterns cause performance degradation. Aiming to address these challenges, we propose a transfer learning framework, TransFall, for sensor-based activity recognition. TransFall's design contains a two-tier data transformation, a label estimation layer, and a model generation layer to recognize activities for the new scenario. We validate TransFall analytically and empirically.

Alireza Ghods, Diane J Cook

Deep neural networks have introduced novel and useful tools to the machine learning community. Other types of classifiers can potentially make use of these tools as well to improve their performance and generality. This paper reviews the current state of the art for deep learning classifier technologies that are being used outside of deep neural networks. Non-network classifiers can employ many components found in deep neural network architectures. In this paper, we review the feature learning, optimization, and regularization methods that form a core of deep network technologies. We then survey non-neural network learning algorithms that make innovative use of these methods to improve classification. Because many opportunities and challenges still exist, we discuss directions that can be pursued to expand the area of deep learning for a variety of classification algorithms.

Garrett Wilson, Diane J. Cook

Often domain adaptation is performed using a discriminator (domain classifier) to learn domain-invariant feature representations so that a classifier trained on labeled source data will generalize well to unlabeled target data. A line of research stemming from semi-supervised learning uses pseudo labeling to directly generate "pseudo labels" for the unlabeled target data and trains a classifier on the now-labeled target data, where the samples are selected or weighted based on some measure of confidence. In this paper, we propose multi-purposing the discriminator to not only aid in producing domain-invariant representations but also to provide pseudo labeling confidence.

Alireza Ghods, Diane J. Cook

Recognizing activities of daily living (ADLs) plays an essential role in analyzing human health and behavior. The widespread availability of sensors implanted in homes, smartphones, and smart watches have engendered collection of big datasets that reflect human behavior. To obtain a machine learning model based on these data,researchers have developed multiple feature extraction methods. In this study, we investigate a method for automatically extracting universal and meaningful features that are applicable across similar time series-based learning tasks such as activity recognition and fall detection. We propose creating a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model to perform this feature learning. Beside avoiding feature engineering, the meaningful features learned by the seq2seq model can also be utilized for semi-supervised learning. We evaluate both of these benefits on datasets collected from wearable and ambient sensors.

Garrett Wilson, Diane J. Cook

Deep learning has produced state-of-the-art results for a variety of tasks. While such approaches for supervised learning have performed well, they assume that training and testing data are drawn from the same distribution, which may not always be the case. As a complement to this challenge, single-source unsupervised domain adaptation can handle situations where a network is trained on labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a related but different target domain with the goal of performing well at test-time on the target domain. Many single-source and typically homogeneous unsupervised deep domain adaptation approaches have thus been developed, combining the powerful, hierarchical representations from deep learning with domain adaptation to reduce reliance on potentially-costly target data labels. This survey will compare these approaches by examining alternative methods, the unique and common elements, results, and theoretical insights. We follow this with a look at application areas and open research directions.