Current public health guidelines on physical activity and sleep duration are limited by a reliance on subjective self-reported evidence. Using data from simple wrist-worn activity monitors, we developed a tailored machine learning model, using balanced random forests with Hidden Markov Models, to reliably detect a number of activity modes. We show that physical activity and sleep behaviours can be classified with 87% accuracy in 159,504 minutes of recorded free-living behaviours from 132 adults. These trained models can be used to infer fine resolution activity patterns at the population scale in 96,220 participants. For example, we find that men spend more time in both low- and high- intensity behaviours, while women spend more time in mixed behaviours. Walking time is highest in spring and sleep time lowest during the summer. This work opens the possibility of future public health guidelines informed by the health consequences associated with specific, objectively measured, physical activity and sleep behaviours.
We make inroads into understanding the robustness of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to adversarial attacks and other input perturbations. While previous work has developed algorithmic approaches to attacking and defending VAEs, there remains a lack of formalization for what it means for a VAE to be robust. To address this, we develop a novel criterion for robustness in probabilistic models: r-robustness. We then use this to construct the first theoretical results for the robustness of VAEs, deriving margins in the input space for which we can provide guarantees about the resulting reconstruction. Informally, we are able to define a region within which any perturbation will produce a reconstruction that is similar to the original reconstruction. To support our analysis, we show that VAEs trained using disentangling methods not only score well under our robustness metrics, but that the reasons for this can be interpreted through our theoretical results.
This paper is concerned with the robustness of VAEs to adversarial attacks. We highlight that conventional VAEs are brittle under attack but that methods recently introduced for disentanglement such as β-TCVAE (Chen et al., 2018) improve robustness, as demonstrated through a variety of previously proposed adversarial attacks (Tabacof et al. (2016); Gondim-Ribeiro et al. (2018); Kos et al.(2018)). This motivated us to develop Seatbelt-VAE, a new hierarchical disentangled VAE that is designed to be significantly more robust to adversarial attacks than existing approaches, while retaining high quality reconstructions. * Willetts and Camuto contributed equally to this work.
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