Investigating causality in human behavior from smartphone sensor data: a quasi-experimental approach
Investigating causality in human behavior from smartphone sensor data: a quasi-experimental approach
复制标题
DOI：
10.1140/epjds/s13688-015-0061-1
复制
发表时间：
2015-12-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.6
通讯作者：
Musolesi, Mirco
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Tsapeli, Fani;Musolesi, Mirco
智能手机和可穿戴设备已经成为我们日常生活中不可或缺的一部分。它们改进的传感和计算能力为人类行为监测和分析带来了新的机会。到目前为止，大多数工作都集中在检测从智能手机数据中提取的特征之间的相关性，而不是因果关系。然而，纯粹的相关性分析不能提供对人类行为的充分理解。此外，因果分析可以让科学家确定对健康和福祉问题有因果影响的因素，如肥胖、压力、抑郁等，并提出应对措施。最后，在这类观测数据中检测因果关系是具有挑战性的，因为通常情况下，受试者不能随机暴露在事件中。在本文中，我们讨论了一个通用准实验框架的设计、实现和评估，该框架用于从智能手机数据对人类行为进行因果关系研究。我们通过调查运动、社会互动和工作等因素对压力水平的因果影响，证明了我们方法的有效性。研究结果表明，锻炼和外出时间以及工作环境对压力水平有正向影响，而工作时间的减少对压力水平的影响很小。
Smartphones and wearables have become an indispensable part of our daily life. Their improved sensing and computing capabilities bring new opportunities for human behavior monitoring and analysis. Most work so far has been focused on detecting correlation rather than causation among features extracted from smartphone data. However, pure correlation analysis does not offer sufficient understanding of human behavior. Moreover, causation analysis could allow scientists to identify factors that have a causal effect on health and well-being issues, such as obesity, stress, depression and so on and suggest actions to deal with them. Finally, detecting causal relationships in this kind of observational data is challenging since, in general, subjects cannot be randomly exposed to an event.In this article, we discuss the design, implementation and evaluation of a generic quasi-experimental framework for conducting causation studies on human behavior from smartphone data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by investigating the causal impact of several factors such as exercise, social interactions and work on stress level. Our results indicate that exercising and spending time outside home and working environment have a positive effect on participants stress level while reduced working hours only slightly impact stress.