  We propose a sparse-coding framework for activity recognition in ubiquitous
and mobile computing that alleviates two fundamental problems of current
supervised learning approaches. (i) It automatically derives a compact, sparse
and meaningful feature representation of sensor data that does not rely on
prior expert knowledge and generalizes extremely well across domain boundaries.
(ii) It exploits unlabeled sample data for bootstrapping effective activity
recognizers, i.e., substantially reduces the amount of ground truth annotation
required for model estimation. Such unlabeled data is trivial to obtain, e.g.,
through contemporary smartphones carried by users as they go about their
everyday activities.
  Based on the self-taught learning paradigm we automatically derive an
over-complete set of basis vectors from unlabeled data that captures inherent
patterns present within activity data. Through projecting raw sensor data onto
the feature space defined by such over-complete sets of basis vectors effective
feature extraction is pursued. Given these learned feature representations,
classification backends are then trained using small amounts of labeled
training data.
  We study the new approach in detail using two datasets which differ in terms
of the recognition tasks and sensor modalities. Primarily we focus on
transportation mode analysis task, a popular task in mobile-phone based
sensing. The sparse-coding framework significantly outperforms the
state-of-the-art in supervised learning approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate
the great practical potential of the new approach by successfully evaluating
its generalization capabilities across both domain and sensor modalities by
considering the popular Opportunity dataset. Our feature learning approach
outperforms state-of-the-art approaches to analyzing activities in daily
living.
