Out-of-distribution in Human Activity Recognition

With the growing interest of the research community in making deep learning (DL) robust and reliable, detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data has become critical. Detecting OOD inputs during test/prediction allows the model to account for discriminative features unknown to the model. This capability increases the model’s reliability since this model provides a class prediction solely at incoming data similar to the training one. OOD detection is well established in computer vision problems. However, it remains relatively under-explored in other domains such as time series (i.e., Human Activity Recognition (HAR)). Since uncertainty has been a critical driver for OOD in vision-based models, the same component has proven effective in time-series applications.We plan to address the OOD detection problem in HAR with time-series data in this work. To test the capability of the proposed method, we define different types of OOD for HAR that arise from realistic scenarios. We apply an ensemble-based temporal learning framework that incorporates uncertainty and detects OOD for the defined HAR workloads. In particular, we extract OODs from popular benchmark HAR datasets and use the framework to separate those OODs from the in-distribution (ID) data. Across all the datasets, the ensemble framework outperformed the traditional deep-learning method (our baseline) on the OOD detection task.