Semi-supervised Federated Learning for Activity Recognition

Abstract: Training deep learning models on in-home IoT sensory data is commonly used to recognise human activities. Recently, federated learning systems that use edge devices as clients to support local human activity recognition have emerged as a new paradigm to combine local (individual-level) and global (group-level) models. This approach provides better scalability and generalisability and also offers better privacy compared with the traditional centralised analysis and learning models. The assumption behind federated learning, however, relies on supervised learning on clients. This requires a large volume of labelled data, which is difficult to collect in uncontrolled IoT environments such as remote in-home monitoring. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition system that uses semi-supervised federated learning, wherein clients conduct unsupervised learning on autoencoders with unlabelled local data to learn general representations, and a cloud server conducts supervised learning on an activity classifier with labelled data. Our experimental results show that using a long short-term memory autoencoder and a Softmax classifier, the accuracy of our proposed system is higher than that of both centralised systems and semi-supervised federated learning using data augmentation. The accuracy is also comparable to that of supervised federated learning systems. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that our system can reduce the number of needed labels and the size of local models, and has faster local activity recognition speed than supervised federated learning does.