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Recent years have witnessed a growing body of research on autonomous activity recognition models for use in deployment of mobile systems in new settings such as when a wearable system is adopted by a new user. Current research, however, lacks comprehensive frameworks for transfer learning. Specifically, it lacks the ability to deal with partially available data in new settings. To address these limitations, we propose {\it OptiMapper}, a novel uninformed cross-subject transfer learning framework for activity recognition. OptiMapper is a combinatorial optimization framework that extracts abstract knowledge across subjects and utilizes this knowledge for developing a personalized and accurate activity recognition model in new subjects. To this end, a novel community-detection-based clustering of unlabeled data is proposed that uses the target user data to construct a network of unannotated sensor observations. The clusters of these target observations are then mapped onto the source clusters using a complete bipartite graph model. In the next step, the mapped labels are conditionally fused with the prediction of a base learner to create a personalized and labeled training dataset for the target user. We present two instantiations of OptiMapper. The first instantiation, which is applicable for transfer learning across domains with identical activity labels, performs a one-to-one bipartite mapping between clusters of the source and target users. The second instantiation performs optimal many-to-one mapping between the source clusters and those of the target. The many-to-one mapping allows us to find an optimal mapping even when the target dataset does not contain sufficient instances of all activity classes. We show that this type of cross-domain mapping can be formulated as a transportation problem and solved optimally. We evaluate our transfer learning techniques on several activity recognition datasets. Our results show that the proposed community detection approach can achieve, on average, 69%$ utilization of the datasets for clustering with an overall clustering accuracy of 87.5%. Our results also suggest that the proposed transfer learning algorithms can achieve up to 22.5% improvement in the activity recognition accuracy, compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results also demonstrate high and sustained performance even in presence of partial data. 

While inferring human activities from sensors embedded in mobile devices using machine learning algorithms has been studied, current research relies primarily on sensor data that are collected in controlled settings often with healthy individuals. Currently, there exists a gap in research about how to design activity recognition models based on sensor data collected with chronically-ill individuals and in free-living environments. In this paper, we focus on a situation where free-living activity data are collected continuously, activity vocabulary (i.e., class labels) are not known as a priori, and sensor data are annotated by end-users through an active learning process. By analyzing sensor data collected in a clinical study involving patients with cardiovascular disease, we demonstrate significant challenges that arise while inferring physical activities in uncontrolled environments. In particular, we observe that activity labels that are distinct in syntax can refer to semantically-identical behaviors, resulting in a sparse label space. To construct a meaningful label space, we propose LabelMerger, a framework for restructuring the label space created through active learning in uncontrolled environments in preparation for training activity recognition models. LabelMerger combines the semantic meaning of activity labels with physical attributes of the activities (i.e., domain knowledge) to generate a flexible and meaningful representation of the labels. Specifically, our approach merges labels using both word embedding techniques from the natural language processing domain and activity intensity from the physical activity research. We show that the new representation of the sensor data obtained by LabelMerger results in more accurate activity recognition models compared to the case where original label space is used to learn recognition models.