  In this paper, a solution to the problem of Active Authentication using trace
histories is addressed. Specifically, the task is to perform user verification
on mobile devices using historical location traces of the user as a function of
time. Considering the movement of a human as a Markovian motion, a modified
Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based solution is proposed. The proposed method,
namely the Marginally Smoothed HMM (MSHMM), utilizes the marginal probabilities
of location and timing information of the observations to smooth-out the
emission probabilities while training. Hence, it can efficiently handle
unforeseen observations during the test phase. The verification performance of
this method is compared to a sequence matching (SM) method , a Markov
Chain-based method (MC) and an HMM with basic Laplace Smoothing (HMM-lap).
Experimental results using the location information of the UMD Active
Authentication Dataset-02 (UMDAA02) and the GeoLife dataset are presented. The
proposed MSHMM method outperforms the compared methods in terms of equal error
rate (EER). Additionally, the effects of different parameters on the proposed
method are discussed.
