A Machine Learning Approach for Prediction of Sedentary Behavior Based on Daily Step Counts

Sedentary behavior is considered as a major public health challenge, linked with many chronic diseases and premature mortality. In this paper, we propose a steps counting -based machine learning approach for the prediction of sedentary behavior. Our work focuses on analyzing historical data from multiple users of wearable physical activity trackers and exploring the performance of four machine learning algorithms, i.e., Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, Convolutional Neural Networks, as well as a Majority Vote Ensemble of the algorithms. To train and test our models we employed a crowd sourced dataset containing a month’s data of 33 users. For further evaluation, we employed a dataset containing 6 months of data of an additional user. The results revealed that while all models succeed in predicting next-day sedentary behavior, the ensemble model outperforms all baselines, as it manages to predict sedentary behavior and reduce false positives more effectively. On the multi-subjects test dataset, our ensemble model achieved an accuracy of 82.12% with a sensitivity of 74.53% and a specificity of 85.71%. On the additional unseen dataset, we achieved 76.88% in accuracy, 63.27% in sensitivity and 81.75% in specificity. These outcomes provide the ground towards the development of real-life artificially intelligent systems for sedentary behavior prediction.