Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been greatly developed with one instance being smart home devices gradually entering into people's lives. To maximize the impact of such deployments, home-based activity recognition is required to initially recognize behaviors within smart home environments and to use this information to provide better health and social care services. Activity recognition has the ability to recognize people's activities from the information about their interaction with the environment collected by sensors embedded within the home. In this paper, binary data collected by anonymous binary sensors such as pressure sensors, contact sensors, passive infrared sensors etc. are used to recognize activities. A radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) with localized stochastic-sensitive autoencoder (LiSSA) method is proposed for the purposes of home-based activity recognition. An autoencoder (AE) is introduced to extract useful features from the binary sensor data by converting binary inputs into continuous inputs to extract increased levels of hidden information. The generalization capability of the proposed method is enhanced by minimizing both the training error and the stochastic sensitivity measure in an attempt to improve the ability of the classifier to tolerate uncertainties in the sensor data. Four binary home-based activity recognition datasets including OrdonezA, OrdonezB, Ulster, and activities of daily living data from van Kasteren (vanKasterenADL) are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with well-known benchmarking approaches including support vector machine (SVM), multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN), random forest and an RBFNN-based method, the proposed method yielded the best performance with 98.35%, 86.26%, 96.31%, 92.31% accuracy on four datasets, respectively. which can be used to underpin a multitude of services such as personal health management [2], elderly care services [3], smart home services [4,5], to name but a few. However, it is a complicated process with many unsolved challenges such as multiple occupancy, interleaved activities, incomplete sensor data and differences in inter-and intra-inhabitant behaviors. As a result, due to the diversity of its data sources (smart home, smart wearable devices, mobile phones sensors and cameras), various solutions have been proposed to solve this problem [6].Some research studies in the area of activity recognition have been based on image data collected by cameras [7][8][9][10]. Limited by computational complexity and privacy issues, this type of activity recognition is mainly used in the field of public safety and human-computer interaction. As an alternative to image-based data, some research has been based on data collected from wearable devices and smartphones [11][12][13]. In this paper, we focus on home-based activity recognition, which is mainly used in elderly care service or smart home service provision. Binary data were collected through binary sensors embedded ...