Incremental Learning in Time-series Data using Reinforcement Learning

System monitoring has become an area of interest with the increasing growth in wearable sensors and continuous monitoring tools. However, the generalizability of the classification models to unseen incoming data remains challenging. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on reinforcement learning (RL) to incre-mentally learn patterns of time-series data and detect changes in the system state. Our rationale is that RL's ability to learn from past experiences can help increase the performance and generalizability of classification models in time-series monitoring applications. Our novel definition of the environment consists of a set of one-class anomaly detectors to define environment states based on the dynamics of the incoming data and a reward function to reward the RL agent according to its actions. A deep RL agent incrementally learns to perform continuous, binary classification predictions according to the environment states and the received reward. We applied the proposed model for detecting response to medication (ON or OFF) in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The PD dataset consisted of 170 minutes of time-series movement signals collected from 12 patients using two wearable sensors. Our proposed model, with a testing accuracy of 77.95%, outperformed Adaptive Boosting, Multi-layer Perceptron, and Support Vector Machines with 53.10%, 44.92%, and 52.70% testing accuracy, respectively. The proposed model had a slight decline in the F-score, decreasing from 88.15% validation score to 78.42% in testing, a significantly slight decline compared to the other three models. These evidence the potential of the proposed RL-based classifier in time-series monitoring applications as a highly generalizable model for unseen incoming data.