7. Feature extraction
The raw samples of the sensor data can be hard for a model to learn from, as it may be high dimensional and have a low signal to noise ratio wrt to the task.
Therefore it can be useful to apply feature extraction to make the problem more tractable. Common feature extraction techniques for time-series and sensor-data include:
Time-domain features
Statistical summaries
Frequency domain (spectrum)
Time-frequency domain (spectrogram)
emlearn provides some tools for some of these.
7.1. Time-domain features
Typical features are
Root Mean Square (RMS) energy
Zero Crossing Rate (ZCR)
7.2. Statistical summaries
Statistical summaries are ways of extracting compact representations of sets of values. This can be useful on time-series data, on spectrum data, or other high-dimensional signals.
Typical features used are:
minimum/maximum
peak2peak
variance / standard deviation
mean
median
25/75 percentile, and Interquartile Distance
7.3. Digital filters
Digital filters can be very useful to process a time-series signal.
Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter is one way of creating digital filters. These are useful for:
Low-pass filters
High-pass filters
Band-pass filters
In Python the IIR filter coefficients can be designed with scipy.signal.iirfilter (by specifying filter order and critical frequencies) or scipy.signal.iirdesign (by specifying stop/passband frequencies and gains).
The design can be output as second-order sections (format=’sos’), and then realized in using IIR digital filters (C API).
7.4. Spectrum (frequency domain)
Many phenomena can be easier to separate in the frequency domain, rather than the time-domain. The most common way to transform is using the FFT, which is implemented in Fast Fourier Transform (C API).
7.5. Spectrogram (time-frequency domain)
A spectrogram decomposes a time-series into both time and frequency, creating a 2d image-like representation. Spectrograms are commonly used with a wide range of input data, such as: sound, accelerometer, Electrocardiogram (ECG), seismology, etc.
It is most commonly done by applying the FFT to overlapped consecutive time windows. This technique is called Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT). An alternative is to use multiple FIR or IIR bandpass filters to form a filterbank.
A special case of a spectrogram called the Mel-frequency spectrogram is particularly popular for audio machine learning applications.
Code can be found in Audio processing (C API).
7.6. Integrating feature extraction
It is practical to start prototyping and testing feature extraction approaches in Python, using the wide range of available functions and libraries. But once the appropriate feature extraction method has been identified, it is normally implemented in C to run on the target device. It is recommended to use the same C code also during training. This reduces the risk of divergence in feature extraction between target and training, which can have very negative impact on predictive performance.
There are two main approaches to use C code during training (in Python):
Create a C program and use files to pass input/output data
Create Python bindings for the C functions.