A novel physical activity recognition approach using deep ensemble optimized transformers and reinforcement learning

In recent years, human physical activity recognition has increasingly attracted attention from different research fields such as healthcare, computer-human interaction, lifestyle monitoring, and athletics. Deep learning models have been extensively employed in developing physical activity recognition systems. To improve these models, their hyperparameters need to be initialized with optimal values. However, tuning these hyperparameters manually is time-consuming and may lead to inaccurate results. Moreover, the application of these models to different data resources and the integration of their results into the overall data processing pipeline are challenging issues in physical activity recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble method for physical activity recognition based on a deep transformer-based time-series classification model that uses heart rate, speed, and distance time-series data to recognize physical activities. In particular, we develop a modified arithmetic optimization algorithm to automatically adjust the optimal values of the classification models’ hyperparameters. Moreover, a reinforcement learning-based ensemble approach is proposed to optimally integrate the results of the classification models obtained using heart rate, speed, and distance time-series data and, subsequently, recognize the physical activities. Experiments performed on a real-world dataset demonstrated that the proposed method achieves promising efficiency in comparison to other state-of-the-art models. More specifically, the proposed method increases the performance compared to the second-best performer by around 3.44 %, 9.45 %, 5.43 %, 2.54 %, and 7.53 % based on accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score evaluation metrics, respectively.