The effect of hyperparameter search on artificial neural network in human activity recognition

Abstract In the last decade, many researchers applied shallow and deep networks for human activity recognition (HAR). Currently, the trending research line in HAR is applying deep learning to extract features and classify activities from raw data. However, we observed that, authors of previous studies have not performed an efficient hyperparameter search on their artificial neural network (shallow or deep)-based classifier. Therefore, in this article, we demonstrate the effect of the random and Bayesian parameter search on a shallow neural network using five HAR databases. The result of this work shows that a shallow neural network with correct parameter optimization can achieve similar or even better recognition accuracy than the previous best deep classifier(s) on all databases. In addition, we draw conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of the two hyperparameter search techniques according to the results.