Bayesian Active Learning for Wearable Stress and Affect Detection

In the recent past, psychological stress has been increasingly observed in humans, and early detection is crucial to prevent health risks. Stress detection using on-device deep learning algorithms has been on the rise owing to advancements in pervasive computing. However, an important challenge that needs to be addressed is handling unlabeled data in real-time via suitable ground truthing techniques (like Active Learning), which should help establish affective states (labels) while also selecting only the most informative data points to query from an oracle. In this paper, we propose a framework with capabilities to represent model uncertainties through approximations in Bayesian Neural Networks using Monte-Carlo (MC) Dropout. This is combined with suitable acquisition functions for active learning. Empirical results on a popular stress and affect detection dataset experimented on a Raspberry Pi 2 indicate that our proposed framework achieves a considerable efficiency boost during inference, with a substantially low number of acquired pool points during active learning across various acquisition functions. Variation Ratios achieves an accuracy of 90.38% which is comparable to the maximum test accuracy achieved while training on about 40% lesser data.