Hierarchical Active Learning for Model Personalization in the Presence of Label Scarcity

In mobile health (mHealth) and human activity recognition (HAR), collecting labeled data often comes at a significantly higher cost or level of user burden than collecting unlabeled data. This motivates the idea of attempting to optimize the collection of labeled data to minimize cost or burden. In this paper, we develop active learning methods that are tailored to the mHealth and HAR domains to address the problems of labeled data scarcity and the cost of labeled data collection. Specifically, we leverage between-user similarity to propose a novel hierarchical active learning framework that personalizes models for each user while sharing the labeled data collection burden across a group, thereby reducing the labeling effort required by any individual user. We evaluate our framework on a publicly available human activity recognition dataset. Our hierarchical active learning framework on average achieves between a 20% and 70% reduction in labeling effort when compared to standard active learning methods.