Machine Learning Based Physical Activity Extraction for Unannotated Acceleration Data

Sensor based human activity recognition (HAR) is an emerging and challenging research area. The physical activity of people has been associated with many health benefits and even reducing the risk of different diseases. It is possible to collect sensor data related to physical activities of people with wearable devices and embedded sensors, for example in smartphones and smart environments. HAR has been successful in recognizing physical activities with machine learning methods. However, it is a critical challenge to annotate sensor data in HAR. Most existing approaches use supervised machine learning methods which means that true labels need be given to the data when training a machine learning model. Supervised deep learning methods have outperformed traditional machine learning methods in HAR but they require an even more extensive amount of data and true labels. In this thesis, machine learning methods are used to develop a solution that can recognize physical activity (e.g., walking and sedentary time) from unannotated acceleration data collected using a wearable accelerometer device. It is shown to be beneficial to collect and annotate data from physical activity of only one person. Supervised classifiers can be trained with small, labeled acceleration data and more training data can be obtained in a semi-supervised setting by leveraging knowledge from available unannotated data. The semi-supervised En-Co-Training method is used with the traditional supervised machine learning methods K-nearest Neighbor and Random Forest. Also, intensities of activities are produced by the cut point analysis of the OMGUI software as reference information and used to increase confidence of correctly selecting pseudo-labels that are added to the training data. A new metric is suggested to help to evaluate reliability when no true labels are available. It calculates a fraction of predictions that have a correct intensity out of all the predictions according to the cut point analysis of the OMGUI software. The reliability of the supervised KNN and RF classifiers reaches 88 % accuracy and the C-index value 0,93, while the accuracy of the K-means clustering remains 72 % when testing the models on labeled acceleration data. The initial supervised classifiers and the classifiers retrained in a semi-supervised setting are tested on unlabeled data collected from 12 people and measured with the new metric. The overall results improve from 96-98 % to 98-99 %. The results with more challenging activities to the initial classifiers, taking a walk improve from 55-81 % to 67-81 % and jogging from 0-95 % to 95-98 %. It is shown that the results of the KNN and RF classifiers consistently increase in the semi-supervised setting when tested on unannotated, real-life data of 12 people

Self-labeling techniques for semi-supervised time series classification: an empirical study

An increasing amount of unlabeled time series data available render the semi-supervised paradigm a suitable approach to tackle classification problems with a reduced quantity of labeled data. Self-labeled techniques stand out from semi-supervised classification methods due to their simplicity and the lack of strong assumptions about the distribution of the labeled and unlabeled data. This paper addresses the relevance of these techniques in the time series classification context by means of an empirical study that compares successful self-labeled methods in conjunction with various learning schemes and dissimilarity measures. Our experiments involve 35 time series datasets with different ratios of labeled data, aiming to measure the transductive and inductive classification capabilities of the self-labeled methods studied. The results show that the nearest-neighbor rule is a robust choice for the base classifier. In addition, the amending and multi-classifier self-labeled-based approaches reveal a promising attempt to perform semi-supervised classification in the time series context

Embracing Dissonant Voices In English Classrooms

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a pedagogy grounded in dialogical ideals has the potential to empower students to make changes in English classroom interaction. The study first scrutinized the traditional “banking” educational system in English classrooms in which students were passive learners to realize students’ silence and powerlessness in classrooms. Then, after realizing students’ silence and resistance in traditional English classrooms, with a vision of social change, the researcher proposed the dialogical interaction pedagogy to the English class to challenge the traditional view of authority and power, with an eye to exposing how dominant education was constructed through language and discourse. Unlike the traditional teaching-learning structures in which instructors act as authorities and subjects, and students act as objects and receivers, the dialogical English classroom, adapted from traditional classroom hierarchy structures, is a double-voiced or even multiple-voiced English learning environment in which both the teacher and students work together to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have long become the norm in the contemporary English classroom system.  &nbsp

Detección de ruido en aprendizaje semisupervisado con el uso de flujos de datos

A menudo, es necesario construir conjuntos de entrenamiento. Si disponemos solamente de un número reducido de objetos etiquetados y de un conjunto numeroso de objetos no etiquetados, podemos construir el conjunto de entrenamiento simulando un flujo de datos no etiquetados de los cuales es necesario aprender para poder incorporarlos al conjunto de entrenamiento. Con el objetivo de prevenir que se deterioren los conjuntos de entrenamiento que se obtienen, en este trabajo se propone un esquema que tiene en cuenta el concept drift, ya que en muchas situaciones la distribución de las clases puede cambiar con el tiempo. Para clasificar los objetos no etiquetados hemos empleado un ensemble de clasificadores y proponemos una estrategia para detectar el ruidoOften, it is necessary to construct training sets. If we have only a small number of tagged objects and a large group of unlabeled objects, we can build the training set simulating a data stream of unlabelled objects from which it is necessary to learn and to incorporate them to the training set later. In order to prevent deterioration of the training set obtained, in this work we propose a scheme that takes into account the concept drift, since in many situations the distribution of classes may change over time. To classify the unlabelled objects we have used an ensemble of classifiers and we propose a strategy to detect the noise after the classification proces