Synthetic Behavior Sequence Generation Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Due to the increase in life expectancy in advanced societies leading to an increase in population age, data-driven systems are receiving more attention to support the older people by monitoring their health. Intelligent sensor networks provide the ability to monitor their activities without interfering with routine life. Data collected from smart homes can be used in a variety of data-driven analyses, including behavior prediction. Due to privacy concerns and the cost and time required to collect data, synthetic data generation methods have been considered seriously by the research community. In this article, we introduce a new Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm, namely, BehavGAN, that applies GAN to the problem of behavior sequence generation. This is achieved by learning the features of a target dataset and utilizing a new application for GANs in the simulation of older people’s behaviors. We also propose an effective reward function for GAN back-propagation by incorporating n-gram-based similarity measures in the reinforcement mechanism. We evaluate our proposed algorithm by generating a dataset of human behavior sequences. Our results show that BehavGAN is more effective in generating behavior sequences compared to MLE, LeakGAN, and the original SeqGAN algorithms in terms of both similarity and diversity of generated data. Our proposed algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art methods when it comes to generating behavior sequences consisting of limited-space sequence tokens.