HAR-CTGAN: A Mobile Sensor Data Generation Tool for Human Activity Recognition

Abstract

Human activity recognition (HAR) is the process of using mobile sensor data to determine the physical activities performed by individuals. HAR is the backbone of many mobile healthcare applications, such as passive health monitoring systems, early diagnosing systems, and fall detection systems. Effective HAR models rely on deep learning architectures and big data in order to accurately classify activities. Unfortunately, HAR datasets are expensive to collect, are often mislabeled, and have large class imbalances. State-of-the-art approaches to address these challenges utilize Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for generating additional synthetic data along with their labels. Problematically, these HAR GANs only synthesize continuous features — features that are represented by real numbers — recorded from gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other sensors that produce continuous data. This is limiting since mobile sensor data commonly has discrete features that provide additional context such as device location and the time-of-day, which have been shown to substantially improve HAR classification. Hence, we studied Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Networks (CTGANs) for data generation to synthesize mobile sensor data containing both continuous and discrete features, a task never been done by state-of-the-art approaches. We show HAR-CTGANs generate data with greater realism resulting in allowing better downstream performance in HAR models, and when state-of-the-art models were modified with HAR-CTGAN characteristics, downstream performance also improves.