Adversarial Unsupervised Representation Learning for Activity Time-Series

Abstract

Sufficient physical activity and restful sleep play a major role in the prevention and cure of many chronic conditions. Being able to proactively screen and monitor such chronic conditions would be a big step forward for overall health. The rapid increase in the popularity of wearable devices pro-vides a significant new source, making it possible to track the user’s lifestyle real-time. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised representation learning technique called activ-ity2vecthat learns and “summarizes” the discrete-valued ac-tivity time-series. It learns the representations with three com-ponents: (i) the co-occurrence and magnitude of the activ-ity levels in a time-segment, (ii) neighboring context of the time-segment, and (iii) promoting subject-invariance with ad-versarial training. We evaluate our method on four disorder prediction tasks using linear classifiers. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that our proposed method scales and performs better than many strong baselines. The adversarial regime helps improve the generalizability of our representations by promoting subject invariant features. We also show that using the representations at the level of a day works the best since human activity is structured in terms of daily routines.