Guided regularized random forest feature selection for smartphone based human activity recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) is an eminent area of research due to its extensive scope of applications in remote health monitoring, sports, smart home, and many more. Smartphone-based HAR systems use high-dimensional sensor data to infer human physical activities. Researchers continuously endeavor to select pertinent and non-redundant features without compromising the classification accuracy. In this work, our aim is to build an efficient HAR model that not only extracts the most relevant features from the 3-axial accelerometer and gyroscope signal data but also enhances the classification accuracy of the HAR system, without data loss using time-frequency domain features. We propose a feature selection method based on guided regularized random forest (GRRF) to determine the most pertinent and non-redundant features to reduce the time to recognize the human activities efficiently. After selecting the most relevant features, a support vector machine (SVM) is used to identify various human physical activities. The UCI public dataset and a self-collected dataset are used to assess the generalization capability and performance of the proposed feature selection method. Eventually, the accuracy reached 99.10% and 99.30% on the self-collected and UCI HAR datasets, respectively.