Transfer learning for activity recognition via sensor mapping

Activity recognition aims to identify and predict human activities based on a series of sensor readings. In recent years, machine learning methods have become popular in solving activity recognition problems. A special difficulty for adopting machine learning methods is the workload to annotate a large number of sensor readings as training data. Labeling sensor readings for their corresponding activities is a time-consuming task. In practice, we often have a set of labeled training instances ready for an activity recognition task. If we can transfer such knowledge to a new activity recognition scenario that is different from, but related to, the source domain, it will ease our effort to perform manual labeling of training data for the new scenario. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning framework based on automatically learning a correspondence between different sets of sensors to solve this transfer-learning in activity recognition problem. We validate our framework on two different datasets and compare it against previous approaches of activity recognition, and demonstrate its effectiveness.