Bayesian-based scenario generation method for human activities

Emerging smart space applications are increasingly relying on capabilities for recognizing human activities. Activity recognition research is however challenged and slowed by the lack of data necessary for testing and validation. Collecting data through live-in trials in real world deployments is often very expensive and complicated. Legitimate limitations on the use of human subjects also renders a much smaller dataset than desired to be collected. To address this challenge, we propose a scenario generation approach in which a small set of scenarios is used to generate new relevant and realistic scenarios, and hence increase the base of testing data needed for activity recognition validation. Unlike existing methods for generating scenarios, which usually focus on scenario structure and complexity, we propose a Bayesian-based approach that learns the stochastic characteristics of a small number of collected datasets to generate additional scenarios of similar characteristics. Our approach is prolific and can generate enormous datasets with high degree of realism at affordable cost. The proposed approach is validated using a Viterbi-based algorithm and a real dataset case study. The validation experiment confirms that the generated dataset has highly similar stochastic characteristics as that of the real dataset.