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Enhancing human activity recognition with multi-head self-attention and stacked autoencoders Cover

Enhancing human activity recognition with multi-head self-attention and stacked autoencoders

Open Access
|May 2026

Figures & Tables

Figure 1:

Overview of proposed work. SAE, stacked autoencoder.

Figure 2:

Comparison against the activity class.

Figure 3:

Pictorial representation of physical activities (standing, sitting, walking, running, lying down, and climbing stairs) along with their corresponding recognition accuracies based on the MHSA-SAE model. MHSA-SAE, multi-head self-attention enhanced stacked autoencoder.

Figure 4:

Accuracy comparison. MASH, method for activity sleep harmonization; MHSA-SAE, multi-head self-attention enhanced stacked autoencoder; SVM, support vector machine.

Figure 5:

F1 score comparison. MHSA-SAE, multi-head self-attention enhanced stacked autoencoder; SVM, support vector machine.

Figure 6:

ROC curve. AUC, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve; MHSA-SAE, multi-head self-attention enhanced stacked autoencoder.

Ablation study – impact of model components

ConfigurationAccuracy (%)F1-score (%)
SAE only (no attention)93.1091.90
SAE + single-head attention95.3094.40
Proposed study97.8296.67

j_ijssis-2026-0024_tab_006

Algorithm: MHSA-SAE
Input: X ∈ ℝn×t×d
Output: Y ∈ ℝn×c
1. Preprocess:
X ← Normalize(X)
2. Encode:
     HfSAE (X)
3. Apply Attention:
  Q, K, V ← Linear(H)
  A ← MHSA(Q, K, V)
4. Classify:
    YSoftmax (Wc · A+bc)
Return Y

Comparison with existing methods

Model/MethodologyAccuracy (%)F1-score (%)AUC (%)
Chong et al. [15] - Feature selection + SVM91.8090.5092.30
Jeong et al. [12] – DL with noninvasive biomarkers93.2092.7093.90
Dooley et al. [13] - MASH harmonization with wearables94.6093.8095.10
Proposed MHSA-SAE (Ours)97.8296.6798.10

Performance of MHSA-SAE on test set

MetricValue (%)
Accuracy97.82
Precision96.45
Recall96.90
F1-score96.67
AUC98.10

Class-wise precision, recall, and F1-score

Activity ClassPrecision (%)Recall (%)F1-Score (%)
Standing98.198.498.2
Walking97.396.997.1
Running95.094.694.8
Sitting96.797.096.8
Lying down94.595.394.9
Climbing stairs93.192.792.9

Training vs_ validation accuracy over epochs

EpochTraining accuracy (%)Validation accuracy (%)
1084.6082.30
3091.2089.70
6096.1094.80
9097.8097.20
10098.0097.40
Language: English
Submitted on: May 19, 2025
Published on: May 15, 2026
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2026 S. Anandanarayanan, S. Thirumaran, published by Macquarie University, Australia
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.