Toward Personalized Context Recognition for Mobile Users: A Semisupervised Bayesian HMM Approach

The problem of mobile context recognition targets the identification of semantic meaning of context in a mobile environment. This plays an important role in understanding mobile user behaviors and thus provides the opportunity for the development of better intelligent context-aware services. A key step of context recognition is to model the personalized contextual information of mobile users. Although many studies have been devoted to mobile context modeling, limited efforts have been made on the exploitation of the sequential and dependency characteristics of mobile contextual information. Also, the latent semantics behind mobile context are often ambiguous and poorly understood. Indeed, a promising direction is to incorporate some domain knowledge of common contexts, such as “waiting for a bus” or “having dinner,” by modeling both labeled and unlabeled context data from mobile users because there are often few labeled contexts available in practice. To this end, in this article, we propose a sequence-based semisupervised approach to modeling personalized context for mobile users. Specifically, we first exploit the Bayesian Hidden Markov Model (B-HMM) for modeling context in the form of probabilistic distributions and transitions of raw context data. Also, we propose a sequential model by extending B-HMM with the prior knowledge of contextual features to model context more accurately. Then, to efficiently learn the parameters and initial values of the proposed models, we develop a novel approach for parameter estimation by integrating the Dirichlet Process Mixture (DPM) model and the Mixture Unigram (MU) model. Furthermore, by incorporating both user-labeled and unlabeled data, we propose a semisupervised learning-based algorithm to identify and model the latent semantics of context. Finally, experimental results on real-world data clearly validate both the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approaches for recognizing personalized context of mobile users.