Feature Anchors for Time-Series Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition
For the wearable HAR community, this work provides a method to combine the interpretability of handcrafted features with the adaptability of deep learning, achieving strong empirical gains.
The paper proposes TCNet, which treats handcrafted time-series features as explicit, adaptable anchors inside a neural network for wearable HAR. Across five benchmarks, TCNet achieves up to 94.5% mF1 and outperforms rTsfNet by 4.5–14.6 points, showing that keeping features explicit and adaptable improves performance.
Wearable Human Activity Recognition (HAR) still lacks a representation that is both explicit and adaptable. Handcrafted time-series features (TSFs) capture meaningful motion statistics and remain competitive on standard benchmarks, but they are usually used as fixed preprocessing outputs. Deep models learn adaptable representations directly from raw signals, but those representations are typically latent and difficult to inspect. We address this gap by treating handcrafted TSFs as feature anchors: explicit intermediate representations that remain inside the model and are adjusted by neural context instead of being discarded. We propose the Temporal Conditioning Network for Feature Anchors (TCNet), which extracts handcrafted anchors, encodes complementary time-domain and frequency-domain context from raw IMU windows, and predicts context-conditioned scale, bias, and gating parameters to modulate anchor groups directly in feature space. This design keeps anchor semantics visible while allowing the representation to adapt to the classification objective. Across five HAR benchmarks, TCNet achieves 70.2% mF1 on USC-HAD, 85.1% mF1 on Daphnet, 93.9% mF1 on MHealth, and 94.5% mF1 on PAMAP2. Relative to rTsfNet, it improves by 4.5 points on USC-HAD, 14.6 points on Daphnet, and 6.5 points on MHealth. Ablations show that the gains come primarily from anchor guidance rather than simple branch fusion, and feature-space analyses indicate that several discriminative TSF families are not reliably accessible in standard latent representations. These results suggest that, for HAR, handcrafted TSFs are most useful when they remain explicit and adaptable within the model. The code is available at: https://github.com/ni-x-lab/TCNet-har