Detection of Dementia-Related Abnormal Behaviour Using Recursive Auto-Encoders.

Age-related health issues have been increasing with the rise of life expectancy all over the world. One of these problems is cognitive impairment, which causes elderly people to have problems performing their daily activities. Detection of cognitive impairment at an early stage would enable medical doctors to deepen diagnosis and follow-up on patient status. Recent studies show that daily activities can be used to assess the cognitive status of elderly people. Additionally, the intrinsic structure of activities and the relationships between their sub-activities are important clues for capturing the cognitive abilities of seniors. Existing methods perceive each activity as a stand-alone unit while ignoring their inner structural relationships. This study investigates such relationships by modelling activities hierarchically from their sub-activities, with the overall goal of detecting abnormal activities linked to cognitive impairment. For this purpose, recursive auto-encoders (RAE) and their linear vs. greedy and supervised vs. semi-supervised variants are adopted to model the activities. Then, abnormal activities are systematically detected using RAE's reconstruction error. Moreover, to apply RAEs for this problem, we introduce a new sensor representation called raw sensor measurement (RSM) that captures the intrinsic structure of activities, such as the frequency and the order of sensor activations. As real-world data are not accessible, we generated data by simulating abnormal behaviour, which reflects on cognitive impairment. Extensive experiments show that RAEs can be used as a decision-supporting tool, especially when the training set is not labelled to detect early indicators of dementia.

Competitive Normalized Least-Squares Regression.

Online learning has witnessed an increasing interest over the recent past due to its low computational requirements and its relevance to a broad range of streaming applications. In this brief, we focus on online regularized regression. We propose a novel efficient online regression algorithm, called online normalized least-squares (ONLS). We perform theoretical analysis by comparing the total loss of ONLS against the normalized gradient descent (NGD) algorithm and the best off-line LS predictor. We show, in particular, that ONLS allows for a better bias-variance tradeoff than those state-of-the-art gradient descent-based LS algorithms as well as a better control on the level of shrinkage of the features toward the null. Finally, we conduct an empirical study to illustrate the great performance of ONLS against some state-of-the-art algorithms using real-world data.

Detection of abnormal behaviour for dementia sufferers using Convolutional Neural Networks.

In recent years, there is a rapid increase in the population of elderly people. However, elderly people may suffer from the consequences of cognitive decline, which is a mental health disorder that primarily affects cognitive abilities such as learning, memory, etc. As a result, the elderly people may get dependent on caregivers to complete daily life tasks. Detecting the early indicators of dementia before it gets worsen and warning the caregivers and medical doctors would be helpful for further diagnosis. In this paper, the problem of activity recognition and abnormal behaviour detection is investigated for elderly people with dementia. First of all, the paper presents a methodology for generating synthetic data reflecting on some behavioural difficulties of people with dementia given the difficulty of obtaining real-world data. Secondly, the paper explores Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to model patterns in activity sequences and detect abnormal behaviour related to dementia. Activity recognition is considered as a sequence labelling problem, while abnormal behaviour is flagged based on the deviation from normal patterns. Moreover, the performance of CNNs is compared against the state-of-art methods such as Naïve Bayes (NB), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HSMM), Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The results obtained indicate that CNNs are competitive with those state-of-art methods.

A Bi-Criteria Active Learning Algorithm for Dynamic Data Streams.

Active learning (AL) is a promising way to efficiently build up training sets with minimal supervision. A learner deliberately queries specific instances to tune the classifier's model using as few labels as possible. The challenge for streaming is that the data distribution may evolve over time, and therefore the model must adapt. Another challenge is the sampling bias where the sampled training set does not reflect the underlying data distribution. In the presence of concept drift, sampling bias is more likely to occur as the training set needs to represent the whole evolving data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel bi-criteria AL (BAL) approach that relies on two selection criteria, namely, label uncertainty criterion and density-based criterion. While the first criterion selects instances that are the most uncertain in terms of class membership, the latter dynamically curbs the sampling bias by weighting the samples to reflect on the true underlying distribution. To design and implement these two criteria for learning from streams, BAL adopts a Bayesian online learning approach and combines online classification and online clustering through the use of online logistic regression and online growing Gaussian mixture models, respectively. Empirical results obtained on standard synthetic and real-world benchmarks show the high performance of the proposed BAL method compared with the state-of-the-art AL methods.

Active learning for classifying data streams with unknown number of classes.

The classification of data streams is an interesting but also a challenging problem. A data stream may grow infinitely making it impractical for storage prior to processing and classification. Due to its dynamic nature, the underlying distribution of the data stream may change over time resulting in the so-called concept drift or the possible emergence and fading of classes, known as concept evolution. In addition, acquiring labels of data samples in a stream is admittedly expensive if not infeasible at all. In this paper, we propose a novel stream-based active learning algorithm (SAL) which is capable of coping with both concept drift and concept evolution by adapting the classification model to the dynamic changes in the stream. SAL is the first AL algorithm in the literature to explicitly take account of these concepts. Moreover, using SAL, only labels of samples that are expected to reduce the expected future error are queried. This process is done while tackling the problem of sampling bias so that samples that induce the change (i.e., drifting samples or samples coming from new classes) are queried. To efficiently implement SAL, the paper proposes the application of non-parametric Bayesian models allowing to cope with the lack of prior knowledge about the data stream. In particular, Dirichlet mixture models and the stick breaking process are adopted and adapted to meet the requirements of online learning. The empirical results obtained on real-world benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SAL in terms of classification performance over the state-of-the-art methods using average and average class accuracy.