Automated explainable and interpretable framework for anomaly detection and human activity recognition in smart homes

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for activity recognition and anomaly detection in smart home environments, targeting applications in convenience, efficiency, responsiveness, and healthcare. The proposed framework incorporates explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to interpret feature impacts on learning models and optimize feature selection for activity recognition and anomaly detection. The study examines the recognition of two activity sets: Activities Set I, comprising 8 activities, and Activities Set II, comprising 11 activities. Various machine learning models (random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), and XGBoost (XGB)) are employed, along with an ensemble voting classifier (EVC) with these machine learning. EVC achieved 91% accuracy for Activities Set I and 90–91% accuracy for Activities Set II. The model demonstrated strong precision, recall, and F1-score across most classes. For anomaly detection, the Isolation Forest and H2O Isolation Forest Estimator algorithms are utilized to uncover irregularities in daily routines. The Isolation Forest identified anomalies in activities such as chores and desk-related tasks, while the H2O Isolation Forest Estimator detected no anomalies in either activity set. This study underscores the potential of the proposed framework to enhance smart home functionality and highlights avenues for future research and system improvements.