Hierarchical Syntactic Models for Human Activity Recognition through Mobility Traces

AbstractRecognizing users’ daily life activities without disrupting their lifestyle is a key functionality to enable a broad variety of advanced services for a Smart City, from energy-efficient management of urban spaces to mobility optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel method for human activity recognition from a collection of outdoor mobility traces acquired through wearable devices. Our method exploits the regularities naturally present in human mobility patterns to construct syntactic models in the form of finite state automata, thanks to an approach known asgrammatical inference. We also introduce a measure ofsimilaritythat accounts for the intrinsic hierarchical nature of su…