Deep generative domain adaptation with temporal relation attention mechanism for cross-user activity recognition

In sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR), a predominant assumption is that the data utilized for training and evaluation purposes are drawn from the same distribution. It is also assumed that all data samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). Contrarily, practical implementations often challenge this notion, manifesting data distribution discrepancies, especially in scenarios such as cross-user HAR. Domain adaptation is the promising approach to address these challenges inherent in cross-user HAR tasks. However, a clear gap in domain adaptation techniques is the neglect of the temporal dependency relation embedded within time series data during the phase of aligning data distributions. Addressing this oversight, our research presents the Deep Generative Domain Adaptation with Temporal Attention (DGDATA) method. This novel method uniquely recognizes and integrates temporal dependency relations during the domain adaptation process. By synergizing the capabilities of generative models with the Temporal Relation Attention mechanism, our method improves the classification performance in cross-user HAR. The evaluation has been conducted on three public sensor-based HAR datasets targeting daily living activity and sports fitness activity scenarios to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed DGDATA method.