Abstract

In this paper, a noise injection method to improve personal recognition models is presented. The idea of the method is to build more general recognition models for eHealth using a small original data set and by expanding the area covered by training data using noise injection. This way, it is possible to train models that are less vulnerable to changing conditions, and thus more accurate, but still the data gathering phase can be non-burdensome. The proposed method was tested using two classifiers (linear discriminant analysis and quadratic discriminant analysis) and three human activity recognition data sets collected using inertial sensors of a smartphone. Two of these data sets are open data sets. The results show that noise injection improves the true positive recognition rates. With first data set the improvement varies from 1.3 to 2.0 percentage units, with second from 1.4 to 4.5 percentage units, and with third the highest improvement was 2.5 percentage units. Moreover, the results show that the method improves precision and reduces false positive rates. In addition, experiments were made using different training set sizes to show that the improvement in true positive rate is bigger if the original training data set is small. In this study, the method is experimented using human activity data sets but it is not limited to this application area and can be used with any time series data.