Mobile devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the latest generation of smart cell phones now incorporates many diverse and powerful sensors. These sensors include GPS sensors, vision sensors (i.e., cameras), audio sensors (i.e., microphones), light sensors, temperature sensors, direction sensors (i.e., magnetic compasses), and acceleration sensors (i.e., accelerometers). The availability of these sensors in mass-marketed communication devices creates exciting new opportunities for data mining and data mining applications. In this paper we describe and evaluate a system that uses phone-based accelerometers to perform activity recognition, a task which involves identifying the physical activity a user is performing. To implement our system we collected labeled accelerometer data from twenty-nine users as they performed daily activities such as walking, jogging, climbing stairs, sitting, and standing, and then aggregated this time series data into examples that summarize the user activity over 10- second intervals. We then used the resulting training data to induce a predictive model for activity recognition. This work is significant because the activity recognition model permits us to gain useful knowledge about the habits of millions of users passively---just by having them carry cell phones in their pockets. Our work has a wide range of applications, including automatic customization of the mobile device's behavior based upon a user's activity (e.g., sending calls directly to voicemail if a user is jogging) and generating a daily/weekly activity profile to determine if a user (perhaps an obese child) is performing a healthy amount of exercise.

Rare objects are often of great interest and great value. Until recently, however, rarity has not received much attention in the context of data mining. Now, as increasingly complex real-world problems are addressed, rarity, and the related problem of imbalanced data, are taking center stage. This article discusses the role that rare classes and rare cases play in data mining. The problems that can result from these two forms of rarity are described in detail, as are methods for addressing these problems. These descriptions utilize examples from existing research. So that this article provides a good survey of the literature on rarity in data mining. This article also demonstrates that rare classes and rare cases are very similar phenomena---both forms of rarity are shown to cause similar problems during data mining and benefit from the same remediation methods.

For large, real-world inductive learning problems, the number of training examples often must be limited due to the costs associated with procuring, preparing, and storing the training examples and/or the computational costs associated with learning from them. In such circumstances, one question of practical importance is: if only n training examples can be selected, in what proportion should the classes be represented? In this article we help to answer this question by analyzing, for a fixed training-set size, the relationship between the class distribution of the training data and the performance of classification trees induced from these data. We study twenty-six data sets and, for each, determine the best class distribution for learning. The naturally occurring class distribution is shown to generally perform well when classifier performance is evaluated using undifferentiated error rate (0/1 loss). However, when the area under the ROC curve is used to evaluate classifier performance, a balanced distribution is shown to perform well. Since neither of these choices for class distribution always generates the best-performing classifier, we introduce a budget-sensitive progressive sampling algorithm for selecting training examples based on the class associated with each example. An empirical analysis of this algorithm shows that the class distribution of the resulting training set yields classifiers with good (nearly-optimal) classification performance.

Smartphones and smartwatches, which include powerful sensors, provide a readily available platform for implementing and deploying mobile motion-based behavioral biometrics. However, the few studies that utilize these commercial devices for motion-based biometrics are quite limited in terms of the sensors and physical activities that they evaluate. In many such studies, only the smartwatch accelerometer is utilized and only one physical activity, walking, is investigated. In this study we consider the accelerome-ter and gyroscope sensor on both the smartphone and smartwatch, and determine which combination of sensors performs best. Furthermore, eighteen diverse activities of daily living are evaluated for their bio-metric efficacy and, unlike most other studies, biometric identification is evaluated in addition to biometric authentication. The results presented in this article show that motion-based biometrics using smartphones and/or smartwatches yield good results, and that these results hold for the eighteen activities. This suggests that zero-effort continuous biometrics based on normal activities of daily living is feasible, and also demon-strates that certain easy-to-perform activities, such as clapping, may be a viable alternative (or supplement) to gait-based biometrics.

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and now incorporate many diverse and powerful sensors. The latest generation of smart phones is especially laden with sensors, including GPS sensors, vision sensors (cameras), audio sensors (microphones), light sensors, temperature sensors, direction sensors (compasses), and acceleration sensors. In this paper we describe and evaluate a system that uses phone-based acceleration sensors, called accelerometers, to identify and authenticate cell phone users. This form of behavioral biométrie identification is possible because a person's movements form a unique signature and this is reflected in the accelerometer data that they generate. To implement our system we collected accelerometer data from thirty-six users as they performed normal daily activities such as walking, jogging, and climbing stairs, aggregated this time series data into examples, and then applied standard classification algorithms to the resulting data to generate predictive models. These models either predict the identity of the individual from the set of thirty-six users, a task we call user identification, or predict whether (or not) the user is a specific user, a task we call user authentication. This work is notable because it enables identification and authentication to occur unobtrusively, without the users taking any extra actions-all they need to do is carry their cell phones. There are many uses for this work. For example, in environments where sharing may take place, our work can be used to automatically customize a mobile device to a user. It can also be used to provide device security by enabling usage for only specific users and can provide an extra level of identity verification.

Smartwatches and smartphones contain accelerometers and gyroscopes that sense a user's movements, and can help identify the activity a user is performing. Research into smartphone-based activity recognition has exploded over the past few years, but research into smartwatch-based activity recognition is still in its infancy. In this paper we compare smartwatch and smartphone-based activity recognition, and smartwatches are shown to be capable of identifying specialized hand-based activities, such as eating activities, which cannot be effectively recognized using a smartphone (e.g., smartwatches can identify the "drinking" activity with 93.3% accuracy while smartphones achieve an accuracy of only 77.3%). Smartwatch-based activity recognition can form the basis of new biomedical and health applications, including applications that automatically track a user's eating habits.