Affective State Recognition with Convolutional Autoencoders

The aim of this study was to create a robust generalizable model to classify person's affective state based on physiological signals obtained using wearable sensor devices. Traditional machine learning methods require manual feature extraction from time sequences. Deep learning methods, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), can automatically extract features from time sequences. However, CNN models can be prone to overfitting, especially when the dataset is small. We apply a novel idea of using unsupervised convolutional autoencoders to automatically extract features from time-series data that are then fed to supervised classifier to classify people's affective state. We achieve almost 3% accuracy increase over traditional CNN model using all physio data from WESAD dataset, 2% increase using chest only physio data, and 8% increase using wrist only physio data while classifying neutral, stress, and amusement states. Code to reproduce the results can be found at https://github.com/srovins/wesad Clinical Relevance- A high-performing affective state recognition system can be utilized for various medical applications, ranging from patient monitoring to cognitive therapy.