Sensor event sequence prediction for proactive smart home: A GPT2-based autoregressive language model approach

We propose a framework for predicting sensor event sequences (SES) in smart homes, which can proactively support residents’ activities and alert them if activities are not completed as intended. We leverage ongoing activity recognition to enhance the prediction performance, employing a GPT2-based model typically used for sentence generation. We hypothesize that the relationship between ongoing activities and SES patterns is akin to the relationship between topics and word sequence patterns in natural language processing (NLP), enabling us to apply the GPT2-based model to SES prediction. We empirically evaluated our method using two real-world datasets in which residents performed their usual daily activities. Our experimental results demonstrates that the use of the GPT2-based model significantly improves the F1 value of SES prediction from 0.461 to 0.708 compared to the state-of-the-art method, and that leveraging knowledge on ongoing activity can further improve performance to 0.837. Achieving these SES predictions using the ongoing activity recognition model required simple feature engineering and modeling, yielding a performance rate of approximately 80%.