Assessing Activity Pattern Similarity with Multidimensional Sequence Alignment based on a Multiobjective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithm.

ABSTRACT

Due to the complexity and multidimensional characteristics of human activities, assessing the similarity of human activity patterns and classifying individuals with similar patterns remains highly challenging. This paper presents a new and unique methodology for evaluating the similarity among individual activity patterns. It conceptualizes multidimensional sequence alignment (MDSA) as a multiobjective optimization problem, and solves this problem with an evolutionary algorithm. The study utilizes sequence alignment to code multiple facets of human activities into multidimensional sequences, and to treat similarity assessment as a multiobjective optimization problem that aims to minimize the alignment cost for all dimensions simultaneously. A multiobjective optimization evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) is used to generate a diverse set of optimal or near-optimal alignment solutions. Evolutionary operators are specifically designed for this problem, and a local search method also is incorporated to improve the search ability of the algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by comparing it with a popular existing method called ClustalG using a set of 50 sequences. The results indicate that our method outperforms the existing method for most of our selected cases. The multiobjective evolutionary algorithm presented in this paper provides an effective approach for assessing activity pattern similarity, and a foundation for identifying distinctive groups of individuals with similar activity patterns.