  In activity recognition, it is often expensive and time-consuming to acquire
sufficient activity labels. To solve this problem, transfer learning leverages
the labeled samples from the source domain to annotate the target domain which
has few or none labels. Existing approaches typically consider learning a
global domain shift while ignoring the intra-affinity between classes, which
will hinder the performance of the algorithms. In this paper, we propose a
novel and general cross-domain learning framework that can exploit the
intra-affinity of classes to perform intra-class knowledge transfer. The
proposed framework, referred to as Stratified Transfer Learning (STL), can
dramatically improve the classification accuracy for cross-domain activity
recognition. Specifically, STL first obtains pseudo labels for the target
domain via majority voting technique. Then, it performs intra-class knowledge
transfer iteratively to transform both domains into the same subspaces.
Finally, the labels of target domain are obtained via the second annotation. To
evaluate the performance of STL, we conduct comprehensive experiments on three
large public activity recognition datasets~(i.e. OPPORTUNITY, PAMAP2, and UCI
DSADS), which demonstrates that STL significantly outperforms other
state-of-the-art methods w.r.t. classification accuracy (improvement of 7.68%).
Furthermore, we extensively investigate the performance of STL across different
degrees of similarities and activity levels between domains. And we also
discuss the potential of STL in other pervasive computing applications to
provide empirical experience for future research.
