Gesture recognition on few training data using Slow Feature Analysis and parametric bootstrap

Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) has been established as a robust and versatile technique from the neurosciences to learn slowly varying functions from quickly changing signals. Recently, the method has been also applied to classification tasks. Here we apply SFA for the first time to a time series classification problem originating from gesture recognition. The gestures used in our experiments are based on acceleration signals of the Bluetooth Wiimote controller (Nintendo). We show that SFA achieves results comparable to the well-known Random Forest predictor in shorter computation time, given a sufficient number of training patterns. However - and this is a novelty to SFA classification - we discovered that SFA requires the number of training patterns to be strictly greater than the dimension of the nonlinear function space. If too few patterns are available, we find that the model constructed by SFA severely overfits and leads to high test set errors. We analyze the reasons for overfitting and present a new solution based on parametric bootstrap to overcome this problem.