An LSTM Based System for Prediction of Human Activities with Durations

Human activity prediction is an interesting problem with a wide variety of applications like intelligent virtual assistants, contextual marketing, etc. One formulation of this problem is jointly predicting human activities (viz. eating, commuting, etc.) with associated durations. Herein a deep learning system is proposed for this problem. Given a sequence of past activities and durations, the system estimates the probabilities for future activities and their durations. Two distinct Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks are developed that cater to different assumptions about the data and achieve different modeling complexities and prediction accuracies. The networks are trained and tested with two real-world datasets, one being publicly available while the other collected from a field experiment. Modeling on the segment level public dataset mitigates the cold-start problem. Experiments indicate that compared to traditional approaches based on sequence mining or hidden Markov modeling, LSTM networks perform significantly better. The ability of LSTM networks to detect long term correlations in activity data is also demonstrated. The trained models are each less than 500KB in size and can be deployed to run in real-time on a mobile device without any dependencies on the cloud. This can help applications like mobile personal assistants by providing predictive context.