An ensemble maximal feature subset selection for smartphone based human activity recognition

Abstract

Smartphone-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) uses spatiotemporal time series data collected from a smartphone’s in-built accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensor. Real-time HAR datasets such as UCI-HAR and UCI-HAPT extract time and frequency domain statistical features for activity recognition from the collected time series signals. Various Machine Learning techniques have been proposed in the perspective of feature selection through ensemble, traditional, hybrid, and meta-heuristic-based techniques to improve the recognition performance. Though the feature selection techniques have shown promising results, the computational time and selection of valid significant features for better classification performance still need to be included. Moreover, these techniques are highly parameter-dependent and critical to threshold values used for experimentation. This research proposes a novel method of parameter-free ensemble feature selection by combining traditional feature selection algorithms with the concept of association rule mining to obtain the Maximal Feature Subset (MFS), which is used for training and testing the classification model for HAR. Mathematical association rule mining is framed rather than the traditional one to select the associated frequent feature(s) from the feature set evolved by traditional techniques. Experimentation has been carried out on UCI-HAR and UCI-HAPT, and the proposed method has increased the classification efficiency by selecting significant features and reduces computation time significantly.