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Many human activities consist of physical gestures that tend to be performed in certain sequences. Wearable inertial sensor data have as a consequence been employed to automatically detect human activities, lately predominantly with deep learning methods. This article focuses on the necessity of recurrent layers—more specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers—in common Deep Learning architectures for Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Our experimental pipeline investigates the effects of employing none, one, or two LSTM layers, as well as different layers' sizes, within the popular DeepConvLSTM architecture. We evaluate the architecture's performance on five well-known activity recognition datasets and provide an in-depth analysis of the per-class results, showing trends which type of activities or datasets profit the most from the removal of LSTM layers. For 4 out of 5 datasets, an altered architecture with one LSTM layer produces the best prediction results. In our previous work we already investigated the impact of a 2-layered LSTM when dealing with sequential activity data. Extending upon this, we now propose a metric, rGP, which aims to measure the effectiveness of learned temporal patterns for a dataset and can be used as a decision metric whether to include recurrent layers into a network at all. Even for datasets including activities without explicit temporal processes, the rGP can be high, suggesting that temporal patterns were learned, and consequently convolutional networks are being outperformed by networks including recurrent layers. We conclude this article by putting forward the question to what degree popular HAR datasets contain unwanted temporal dependencies, which if not taken care of, can benefit networks in achieving high benchmark scores and give a false sense of overall generability to a real-world setting.

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