Feature Selection for Machine Learning Based Step Length Estimation Algorithms

Abstract

An accurate step length estimation can provide valuable information to different applications such as indoor positioning systems or it can be helpful when analyzing the gait of a user, which can then be used to detect various gait impairments that lead to a reduced step length (caused by e.g., Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis). In this paper, we focus on the estimation of the step length using machine learning techniques that could be used in an indoor positioning system. Previous step length algorithms tried to model the length of a step based on measurements from the accelerometer and some tuneable (user-specific) parameters. Machine-learning-based step length estimation algorithms eliminate these parameters to be tuned. Instead, to adapt these algorithms to different users, it suffices to provide examples of the length of multiple steps for different persons to the machine learning algorithm, so that in the training phase the algorithm can learn to predict the step length for different users. Until now, these machine learning algorithms were trained with features that were chosen intuitively. In this paper, we consider a systematic feature selection algorithm to be able to determine the features from a large collection of features, resulting in the best performance. This resulted in a step length estimator with a mean absolute error of 3.48 cm for a known test person and 4.19 cm for an unknown test person, while current state-of-the-art machine-learning-based step length estimators resulted in a mean absolute error of 4.94 cm and 6.27 cm for respectively a known and unknown test person.