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Intelligent Systems Reference Library 189

Gloria Phillips-Wren
Anna Esposito
Lakhmi C. Jain Editors

Advances in
Data Science:
Methodologies
and Applications
Intelligent Systems Reference Library

Volume 189

Series Editors
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Lakhmi C. Jain, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Centre for
Artificial Intelligence, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia,
KES International, Shoreham-by-Sea, UK;
Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK
The aim of this series is to publish a Reference Library, including novel advances
and developments in all aspects of Intelligent Systems in an easily accessible and
well structured form. The series includes reference works, handbooks, compendia,
textbooks, well-structured monographs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. It contains
well integrated knowledge and current information in the field of Intelligent
Systems. The series covers the theory, applications, and design methods of
Intelligent Systems. Virtually all disciplines such as engineering, computer science,
avionics, business, e-commerce, environment, healthcare, physics and life science
are included. The list of topics spans all the areas of modern intelligent systems
such as: Ambient intelligence, Computational intelligence, Social intelligence,
Computational neuroscience, Artificial life, Virtual society, Cognitive systems,
DNA and immunity-based systems, e-Learning and teaching, Human-centred
computing and Machine ethics, Intelligent control, Intelligent data analysis,
Knowledge-based paradigms, Knowledge management, Intelligent agents,
Intelligent decision making, Intelligent network security, Interactive entertainment,
Learning paradigms, Recommender systems, Robotics and Mechatronics including
human-machine teaming, Self-organizing and adaptive systems, Soft computing
including Neural systems, Fuzzy systems, Evolutionary computing and the Fusion
of these paradigms, Perception and Vision, Web intelligence and Multimedia.
** Indexing: The books of this series are submitted to ISI Web of Science,
SCOPUS, DBLP and Springerlink.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8578

Gloria Phillips-Wren Anna Esposito
• •

Lakhmi C. Jain
Editors

Advances in Data Science:

Methodologies
and Applications

123
Editors
Gloria Phillips-Wren Anna Esposito
Sellinger School of Business Dipartimento di Psicologia
and Management Università della Campania
Loyola University Maryland “Luigi Vanvitelli”, and IIASS
Baltimore, MD, USA Caserta, Italy

Lakhmi C. Jain
University of Technology Sydney
Broadway, Australia
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK
KES International
Shoreham-by-Sea, UK

ISSN 1868-4394 ISSN 1868-4408 (electronic)

Intelligent Systems Reference Library
ISBN 978-3-030-51869-1 ISBN 978-3-030-51870-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51870-7
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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Preface

The tremendous advances in inexpensive computing power and intelligent tech-

niques have opened many opportunities for managing and investigating data in
virtually every field including engineering, science, healthcare, business, and so on.
A number of paradigms and applications have been proposed and used by
researchers in recent years as this book attests, and the scope of data science is
expected to grow over the next decade. These future research achievements will
solve old challenges and create new opportunities for growth and development.
The research presented in this book are interdisciplinary and cover themes
embracing emotions, artificial intelligence, robotics applications, sentiment analy-
sis, smart city problems, assistive technologies, speech melody, and fall and
abnormal behavior detection.
This book provides a vision on how technologies are entering into ambient
living places and how methodologies and applications are changing to involve
massive data analysis of human behavior.
The book is directed to researchers, practitioners, professors, and students
interested in recent advances in methodologies and applications of data science. We
believe that this book can also serve as a reference to relate different applications
using a similar methodological approach.
Thank are due to the chapter contributors and reviewers for sharing their deep
expertise and research progress in this exciting field.
The assistance provided by Springer-Verlag is gratefully acknowledged.

Baltimore, Maryland, USA Gloria Phillips-Wren

Caserta, Italy Anna Esposito
Sydney, Australia/Liverpool, UK/Shoreham-by-Sea, UK Lakhmi C. Jain

v
Contents

1 Introduction to Big Data and Data Science: Methods

and Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 1
Gloria Phillips-Wren, Anna Esposito, and Lakhmi C. Jain
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Big Data Management and Analytics Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2.1 Association Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2.2 Decision Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.3 Classification and Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.4 Genetic Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.5 Sentiment Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.6 Social Network Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Description of Book Chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4 Future Research Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2 Towards Abnormal Behavior Detection of Elderly People
Using Big Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... 13
Giovanni Diraco, Alessandro Leone, and Pietro Siciliano
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Related Works and Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 Materials and Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.3.1 Data Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.3.2 Learning Techniques for Abnormal Behavior
Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.3.3 Experimental Setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.4 Results and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

vii
viii Contents

3 A Survey on Automatic Multimodal Emotion Recognition

in the Wild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 35
Garima Sharma and Abhinav Dhall
3.1 Introduction to Emotion Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.2 Emotion Representation Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.2.1 Categorical Emotion Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.2.2 Facial Action Coding System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.2.3 Dimensional (Continous) Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.2.4 Micro-Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.3 Emotion Recognition Based Databases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.4 Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.5 Visual Emotion Recognition Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.5.1 Data Pre-processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.5.2 Feature Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.5.3 Pooling Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.5.4 Deep Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.6 Speech Based Emotion Recognition Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.7 Text Based Emotion Recognition Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.8 Physiological Signals Based Emotion Recognition
Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.9 Fusion Methods Across Modalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.10 Applications of Automatic Emotion Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.11 Privacy in Affective Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.12 Ethics and Fairness in Automatic Emotion Recognition . . . . . . . 56
3.13 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4 “Speech Melody and Speech Content Didn’t Fit
Together”—Differences in Speech Behavior for Device
Directed and Human Directed Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . ........ 65
Ingo Siegert and Julia Krüger
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.3 The Voice Assistant Conversation Corpus (VACC) . . . . . . . . . 71
4.3.1 Experimental Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.3.2 Participant Characterization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.4 Methods for Data Analyzes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.4.1 Addressee Annotation and Addressee
Recognition Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ 75
4.4.2 Open Self Report and Open External Report ........ 77
4.4.3 Structured Feature Report and Feature
Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ 77
Contents ix

4.5 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 80

4.5.1 Addressee Annotation and Addressee
Recognition Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.5.2 Open Self Report and Open External Report . . . . . . . . 82
4.5.3 Structured Feature Report and Feature Comparison . . . 86
4.6 Conclusion and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5 Methods for Optimizing Fuzzy Inference
Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 97
Iosif Papadakis Ktistakis, Garrett Goodman, and Cogan Shimizu
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
5.2 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.2.1 Fuzzy Inference System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.2.2 Genetic Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
5.2.3 Formal Knowledge Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
5.3 Numerical Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.3.1 Data Set Description and Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.3.2 FIS Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.3.3 GA Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.3.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.4 Advancing the Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
6 The Dark Side of Rationality. Does Universal Moral
Grammar Exist? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Nelson Mauro Maldonato, Benedetta Muzii,
Grazia Isabella Continisio, and Anna Esposito
6.1 Moral Decisions and Universal Grammars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
6.2 Aggressiveness and Moral Dilemmas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
6.3 Is This the Inevitable Violence? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
6.4 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
7 A New Unsupervised Neural Approach to Stationary
and Non-stationary Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Vincenzo Randazzo, Giansalvo Cirrincione, and Eros Pasero
7.1 Open Problems in Cluster Analysis and Vector
Quantization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
7.2 G-EXIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.2.1 The G-EXIN Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.3 Growing Curvilinear Component Analysis (GCCA) . . . . . . . . . 131
7.4 GH-EXIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
x Contents

7.5 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

7.5.1 G-EXIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.5.2 GCCA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
7.5.3 GH-EXIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
7.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
8 Fall Risk Assessment Using New sEMG-Based Smart Socks . . . . . . 147
G. Rescio, A. Leone, L. Giampetruzzi, and P. Siciliano
8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
8.2 Materials and Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
8.2.1 Hardware Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
8.2.2 Data Acquisition Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
8.2.3 Software Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
8.2.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
8.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
9 Describing Smart City Problems with Distributed
Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Stefano Marrone
9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
9.2 Related Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
9.2.1 Smart City and Formal Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
9.2.2 Critical Infrastructures Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
9.2.3 Detection Reliability Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
9.3 The Bayesian Network Formalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
9.4 Formalising Distributed Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
9.5 Implementing Distributed Vulnerability with Bayesian
Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
9.6 The Clone Plate Recognition Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
9.7 Applying Distributed Vulnerability Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
9.8 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
10 Feature Set Ensembles for Sentiment Analysis of Tweets . . . . . . . . 189
D. Griol, C. Kanagal-Balakrishna, and Z. Callejas
10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
10.2 State of the Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
10.3 Basic Terminology, Levels and Approaches of Sentiment
Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
10.4 Data Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
10.4.1 Sentiment Lexicons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Contents xi

10.5 Experimental Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200

10.5.1 Feature Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
10.5.2 Results of the Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
10.6 Conclusions and Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
11 Supporting Data Science in Automotive and Robotics
Applications with Advanced Visual Big Data Analytics . . . . . . . . . 209
Marco Xaver Bornschlegl and Matthias L. Hemmje
11.1 Introduction and Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
11.2 State of the Art in Science and Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
11.2.1 Information Visualization and Visual Analytics . . . . . . 211
11.2.2 End User Empowerment and Meta Design . . . . . . . . . . 213
11.2.3 IVIS4BigData . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
11.3 Modeling Anomaly Detection on Car-to-Cloud and Robotic
Sensor Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
11.4 Conceptual IVIS4BigData Technical Software
Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
11.4.1 Technical Specification of the Client-Side Software
Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
11.4.2 Technical Specification of the Server-Side Software
Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
11.5 IVIS4BigData Supporting Advanced Visual Big Data
Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
11.5.1 Application Scenario: Anomaly Detection
on Car-to-Cloud Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
11.5.2 Application Scenario: Predictive Maintenance
Analysis on Robotic Sensor Ata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
11.6 Conclusion and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
12 Classification of Pilot Attentional Behavior Using Ocular
Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Kavyaganga Kilingaru, Zorica Nedic, Lakhmi C. Jain,
Jeffrey Tweedale, and Steve Thatcher
12.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
12.2 Situation Awareness and Attention in Aviation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
12.2.1 Physiological Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
12.2.2 Eye Tracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
12.3 Knowledge Discovery in Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
12.3.1 Knowledge Discovery Process for Instrument
Scan Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
xii Contents

12.4 Simulator Experiment Scenarios and Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

12.4.1 Fixation Distribution Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
12.4.2 Instrument Scan Path Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
12.5 Attentional Behaviour Classification and Rating . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
12.5.1 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
12.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
13 Audio Content-Based Framework for Emotional Music
Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Angelo Ciaramella, Davide Nardone, Antonino Staiano,
and Giuseppe Vettigli
13.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
13.2 Emotional Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
13.2.1 Emotional Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
13.2.2 Intensity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
13.2.3 Rhythm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
13.2.4 Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
13.2.5 Harmony and Spectral Centroid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
13.3 Pre-processing System Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
13.3.1 Representative Sub-tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
13.3.2 Independent Component Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
13.3.3 Pre-processing Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
13.4 Emotion Recognition System Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
13.4.1 Fuzzy and Rough Fuzzy C-Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
13.4.2 Fuzzy Memberships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
13.5 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
13.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
14 Neuro-Kernel-Machine Network Utilizing Deep Learning
and Its Application in Predictive Analytics in Smart City
Energy Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Miltiadis Alamaniotis
14.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
14.2 Kernel Modeled Gaussian Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
14.2.1 Kernel Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
14.2.2 Kernel Modeled Gaussian Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
14.3 Neuro-Kernel-Machine-Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
14.4 Testing and Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
14.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Contents xiii

15 Learning Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition

in Ageing Adults: A Comparative Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Andrea Caroppo, Alessandro Leone, and Pietro Siciliano
15.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
15.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
15.2.1 Pre-processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
15.2.2 Optimized CNN Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
15.2.3 FER Approaches Based on Handcrafted Features . . . . . 318
15.3 Experimental Setup and Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
15.3.1 Performance Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
15.4 Discussion and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
About the Editors

Gloria Phillips-Wren is Full Professor in the

Department of Information Systems, Law and
Operations Management at Loyola University
Maryland. She is Co-editor-in-chief of Intelligent
Decision Technologies International Journal (IDT),
Associate Editor of the Journal of Decision Systems
(JDS) Past Chair of SIGDSA (formerly SIGDSS) under
the auspices of the Association of Information Systems,
a member of the SIGDSA Board, Secretary of IFIP
WG8.3 DSS, and leader of a focus group for KES
International. She received a Ph.D. from the University
of Maryland Baltimore County and holds MS and MBA
degrees. Her research interests and publications are in
decision making and support, data analytics, business
intelligence, and intelligent systems. Her publications
have appeared in Communications of the AIS, Omega,
European Journal of Operations Research, Information
Technology & People, Big Data, and Journal of
Network and Computer Applications, among others.
She has published over 150 articles and 14 books. She
can be reached at: [email protected].

xv
xvi About the Editors

Anna Esposito received her “Laurea Degree” summa

cum laude in Information Technology and Computer
Science from the Università di Salerno with a thesis
published on Complex System, 6(6), 507–517, 1992),
and Ph.D. Degree in Applied Mathematics and
Computer Science from Università di Napoli “Federico
II”. Her Ph.D. thesis published on Phonetica, 59(4),
197–231, 2002, was developed at MIT (1993–1995),
Research Laboratory of Electronics (Cambridge, USA).
Anna has been a Post Doc at the IIASS, and Assistant
Professor at Università di Salerno (Italy), department of
Physics, where she taught Cybernetics, Neural
Networks, and Speech Processing (1996–2000). From
2000 to 2002, she held a Research Professor position at
Wright State University, Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, OH, USA. From 2003, Anna
is Associate Professor in Computer Science at Università
della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (UVA). In 2017, she
has been awarded of the full professorship title. Anna
teach Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues of Multimodal
Communication, Social Networks Dynamics, Cognitive
Economy, and Decision Making. She authored 240+
peer reviewed publications and edited/co-edited 30+
international books. Anna is the Director of the
Behaving Cognitive Systems laboratory (BeCogSys),
at UVA. Currently, the lab is participating to the H2020
funded projects: (a) Empathic, www.empathic-project.
eu/, (b) Menhir, menhir-project.eu/ and the national
funded projects, (c) SIROBOTICS, https://www.
istitutomarino.it/project/si-robotics-social-robotics-for-
active-and-healthy-ageing/, and (d) ANDROIDS,
https://www.psicologia.unicampania.it/research/
projects.
About the Editors xvii

Lakhmi C. Jain, Ph.D., ME, BE(Hons) Fellow

(Engineers Australia) is with the University of
Technology Sydney, Australia, and Liverpool Hope
University, UK.
Professor Jain founded the KES International for
providing professional community the opportunities for
publications, knowledge exchange, cooperation, and
teaming. Involving around 5,000 researchers drawn
from universities and companies world-wide, KES
facilitates international cooperation and generate syn-
ergy in teaching and research. KES regularly provides
networking opportunities for professional community
through one of the largest conferences of its kind in the
area of KES. www.kesinternational.org.
Chapter 1
Introduction to Big Data and Data
Science: Methods and Applications

Gloria Phillips-Wren, Anna Esposito, and Lakhmi C. Jain

Abstract Big data and data science are transforming our world today in ways we
could not have imagined at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The accompa-
nying wave of innovation has sparked advances in healthcare, engineering, business,
science, and human perception, among others. In this chapter we discuss big data
and data science to establish a context for the state-of-the-art technologies and appli-
cations in this book. In addition, to provide a starting point for new researchers,
we present an overview of big data management and analytics methods. Finally, we
suggest opportunities for future research.

Keywords Big data · Data science · Analytics methods

1.1 Introduction

Big data and data science are transforming our world today in ways we could not
have imagined at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although the under-
lying enabling technologies were present in 2000—cloud computing, data storage,

G. Phillips-Wren (B)
Sellinger School of Business and Management, Department of Information Systems, Law and
Operations Management, Loyola University Maryland, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD,
USA
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Esposito
Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, and IIASS,
Caserta, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
L. C. Jain
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK
KES International, Selby, UK

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

G. Phillips-Wren et al. (eds.), Advances in Data Science: Methodologies
and Applications, Intelligent Systems Reference Library 189,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51870-7_1
2 G. Phillips-Wren et al.

internet connectivity, sensors, artificial intelligence, geographic positioning systems

(GPS), CPU power, parallel computing, machine learning—it took the acceleration,
proliferation and convergence of these technologies to make it possible to envision
and achieve massive storage and data analytics at scale. The accompanying wave
of innovation has sparked advances in healthcare, engineering, business, science,
and human perception, among others. This book offers a snapshot of state-of-the-art
technologies and applications in data science that can provide a foundation for future
research and development.
‘Data science’ is a broad term that can be described as “a set of fundamental prin-
ciples that support and guide the principled extraction of information and knowledge
from data” [20], p. 52, to inform decision making. Closely affiliated with data science
is ‘data mining’ that can be defined as the process of extracting knowledge from large
datasets by finding patterns, correlations and anomalies. Thus, data mining is often
used to develop predictions of the future based on the past as interpreted from the
data.
‘Big data’ make possible more refined predictions and non-obvious patterns due
to a larger number of potential variables for prediction and more varied types of data.
In general, ‘big data’ can be defined as having one or more of characteristics of the
3 V’s of Volume, Velocity and Variety [19]. Volume refers to the massive amount
of data; Velocity refers to the speed of data generation; Variety refers to the many
types of data from structured to unstructured. Structured data are organized and can
reside within a fixed field, while unstructured data do not have clear organizational
patterns. For example, customer order history can be represented in a relational
database, while multimedia files such as audio, video, and textual documents do not
have formats that can be pre-defined. Semi-structured data such as email fall between
these two since there are tags or markers to separate semantic elements. In practice,
for example, continual earth satellite imagery is big data with all 3 V’s, and it poses
unique challenges to data scientists for knowledge extraction.
Besides data and methods to handle data, at least two other ingredients are neces-
sary for data science to yield valuable knowledge. First, after potentially relevant data
are collected from various sources, data must be cleaned. Data cleaning or cleansing
is the process of detecting, correcting and removing inaccurate and irrelevant data
related to the problem to be solved. Sometimes new variables need to be created
or data put into a form suitable for analysis. Secondly, the problem must be viewed
from a “data-science perspective [of] … structure and principles, which gives the data
scientist a framework to systematically treat problems of extracting useful knowledge
from data” [20]. Data visualization, domain knowledge for interpretation, creativity,
and sound decision making are all part of a data-science perspective. Thus, advances
in data science require unique expertise from the authors that we are proud to present
in the following pages. The chapters in this book are briefly summarized in Sect. 3
of this article.
However, before proceeding with a description of the chapters, we present an
overview of big data management and analytics methods in the following section.
The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of algorithms and techniques
for data science to help place the chapters in context and to provide a starting point
for new researchers who want to participate in this exciting field.
1 Introduction to Big Data and Data Science: Methods … 3

1.2 Big Data Management and Analytics Methods

When considering advances in data science, big data methods require research atten-
tion. This is because, currently, big data management (i.e. methods to acquire, store,
organize large amount of data) and data analytics (i.e. algorithms devised to analyze
and extract intelligence from data) are rapidly emerging tools for contributing to
advances in data science. In particular, data analytics are techniques for uncov-
ering meanings from data in order to produce intelligence for decision making. Big
data analytics are applied in healthcare, finance, marketing, education, surveillance,
and prediction and are used to mine either structured (as spreadsheets or relational
databases) or unstructured (as text, images, audio, and video data from internal
sources such as cameras—and external sources such as social media) or both types
of data.
Big data analytics is a multi-disciplinary domain spanning several disciplines,
including psychology, sociology, anthropology, computer science, mathematics,
physics, and economics. Uncovering meaning requires complex signal processing
and automatic analysis algorithms to enhance the usability of data collected by
exploiting the plethora of sensors that can be implemented on the current ICT (Infor-
mation Communication Technology) devices and the fusion of information derived
from multi-modal sources. Data analytics methods should correlate this information,
extract knowledge from it, and provide timely comprehensive assessments of rele-
vant daily contextual challenges. To this aim, theoretical fundamentals of intelligent
machine learning techniques must be combined with psychological and social theo-
ries to enable progress in data analytics to the extent that the automatic intelligence
envisaged by these tools augment human understanding and well-being, improving
the quality of life of future societies.
Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) and includes tech-
niques to allow machines the ability to adapt to new settings and detect and extrap-
olate unseen structures and patterns from noisy data. Recent advances in machine
learning techniques have largely contributed to the rise of data analytics by providing
intelligent models for data mining.
The most common advanced data analytics methods are association rule learning
analysis, classification tree analysis (CTA), decision tree algorithms, regression
analysis, genetic algorithms, and some additional analyses that have become popular
with big data such as social media analytics and social network analysis.

1.2.1 Association Rules

Association rule learning analyses include machine learning methodologies

exploiting rule-based learning methods to identify relationships among variables
in large datasets [1, 17]. This is done by considering the concurrent occurrence of
couple or triplets (or more) of selected variables in a specific database under the
4 G. Phillips-Wren et al.

‘support’ and ‘confidence’ constraints. ‘Support’ describes the co-occurrence rule

associated with the selected variables, and ‘confidence’ indicates the probability (or
the percentage) of correctness for the selected rule in the mined database, i.e. confi-
dence is a measure of the validity or ‘interestingness’ of the support rule. Starting
from this initial concept, other constraints or measures of interestingness have been
introduced [3]. Currently association rules are proposed for mining social media and
for social network analysis [6].

1.2.2 Decision Trees

Decision trees are a set of data mining techniques used to identify classes (or cate-
gories) and/or predict behaviors from data. These models are based on a tree-like
structure, with branches splitting the data into homogeneous and non-overlapping
regions and leaves that are terminal nodes where no further splits are possible.
The type of mining implemented by decision trees belongs to supervised classes of
learning algorithms that decide how splitting is done by exploiting a set of training
data for which the target to learn is already known (hence, supervised learning). Once
a classification model is built on the training data, the ability to generalize the model
(i.e. its accuracy) is assessed on the testing data which were never presented during
the training. Decision trees can perform both classification and prediction depending
on how they are trained on categorical (i.e., outcomes are discrete categories and
therefore the mining techniques are called classification tree analyses) or numerical
(i.e., outcomes are numbers, hence the mining techniques are called regression tree
analyses) data.

1.2.3 Classification and Regression

Classification tree analysis (CTA) and regression tree analysis techniques are
largely used in data mining and algorithms to implement classification and regres-
sion. They have been incorporated in widespread data mining software such as SPSS
Clementine, SAS Enterprise Miner, and STATISTICA Data Miner [11, 16]. Recently
classification tree analysis has been used to model time-to-event (survival) data
[13], and regression tree analysis for predicting relationships between animals’ body
morphological characteristics and their yields (or outcomes of their production) such
as meat and milk [12].
1 Introduction to Big Data and Data Science: Methods … 5

1.2.4 Genetic Algorithms

Mining data requires searching for structures in the data that are otherwise unseen,
deriving association rules that are otherwise concealed, and assigning unknown
patterns to existing data categories. This is done at a very high computational cost
since both the size and number of attributes of mined datasets are very large and,
consequently, the dimensions of the search space are a combinatorial function of
them. As more attributes are included in the search space, the number of training
examples is required to increase in order to generate reliable solutions.
Thus, Genetic algorithms (GA) have been introduced in data mining to overcome
these problems by applying to the dataset to be mined a features selection procedure
that reduces the number of attributes to a small set able to significantly arrange the
data into distinct categories. In doing so, GAs assign a value of ‘goodness’ to the
solutions generated at each step and a fitness function to determine which solutions
will breed to produce a better solution by crossing or mutating the existing ones until
an optimal solution is reached. GAs can deal with large search spaces efficiently,
with less chance to reach local minima. This is why they have been applied to large
number of domains [7, 23].

1.2.5 Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis (emotion and opinion mining) techniques analyze texts in

order to extract individuals’ sentiments and opinions on organizations, products,
health states, and events. Texts are mined at document-level or sentence-level to
determine their valence or polarity (positive or negative) or to determine categorical
emotional states such as happiness, sadness, or mood disorders such as depression
and anxiety. The aim is to help decision making [8] in several application domains
such as improving organizations’ wealth and know-how [2], increasing customer
trustworthiness [22], extracting emotions from texts collected from social media and
online reviews [21, 25], and assessing financial news [24]. To do so, several content-
based and linguistic text-based methods are exploited such as such as topic modeling
[9], natural language processing [4], adaptive aspect-based lexicons [15] and neural
networks [18].

1.2.6 Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis techniques are devoted to mine social media contents,
e.g. a pool of online platforms that report on specific contents generated by users.
Contents can be photos, videos, opinions, bookmarks, and more. Social networks
differentiate among those based on their contents and how these contents are shared
6 G. Phillips-Wren et al.

as acquaintance networks (e.g. college/school students), web networks (e.g. Face-

book and LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.), blogs networks (e.g. Blogger, WordPress etc.),
supporter networks (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), liking association networks (e.g.
Instagram, Twitter, etc.), wikis networks (e.g., Wikipedia, Wikihow, etc.), commu-
nication and exchanges networks (e.g. emails, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc.), research
networks (e.g. Researchgate, Academia, Dblp, Wikibooks, etc.), social news (e.g.
Digg and Reddit, etc.), review networks (e.g. Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.), question-and-
answer networks (e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Ask.com), and spread networks (epidemics,
Information, Rumors, etc.).
Social networks are modeled through graphs, where nodes are considered social
entities (e.g. users, organizations, products, cells, companies) and connections (called
also links or edges or ties) between nodes describe relations or interactions among
them. Mining on social networks can be content-based focusing on the data posted or
structure-based focusing on uncovering either information on the network structure
such as discovering communities [5], or identifying authorities or influential nodes
[14], or predicting future links given the current state of the network [10].

1.3 Description of Book Chapters

The research chapters presented in this book are interdisciplinary and include themes
embracing emotions, artificial intelligence, robotics applications, sentiment analysis,
smart city problems, assistive technologies, speech melody, and fall and abnormal
behavior detection. They provide a vision of technologies entering in all the ambient
living places. Some of these methodologies and applications focus the analysis of
massive data to a human-centered view involving human behavior. Thus, the research
described herein is useful for all researchers, practitioners and students interested in
living-related technologies and can serve as a reference point for other applications
using a similar methodological approach. We, thus, briefly describe the research
presented in each chapter.
Chapter 2 by Diraco, Leone and Siciliano investigates the use of big data to assist
caregivers to elderly people. One of the problems that caregivers face is the necessity
of continuous daily checking of the person. This chapter focuses on the use of data
to detect and ultimately to predict abnormal behavior. In this study synthetic data are
generated around daily activities, home location where activities take place, and phys-
iological parameters. The authors find that unsupervised deep-learning techniques
out-perform traditional supervised/semi-supervised ones, with detection accuracy
greater than 96% and prediction lead-time of about 14 days in advance.
Affective computing in the form of emotion recognition techniques and signal
modalities is the topic of Chap. 3 by Sharma and Dhall. After an overview of different
emotion representations and their limitations, the authors turn to a comparison of
databases used in this field. Feature extraction and analysis techniques are presented
along with applications of automatic emotion recognition and issues such as privacy
and fairness.
1 Introduction to Big Data and Data Science: Methods … 7

Chapter 4 by Siegert and Krüger researches the speaking style that people use
when interacting with a technical system such as Alexa and their knowledge of the
speech process. The authors perform analysis using the Voice Assistant Conversation
Corpus (VACC) and find a set of specific features for device-directed speech. Thus,
addressing a technical system with speech is a conscious and regulated individual
process in which a person is aware of modification in their speaking style.
Ktistakis, Goodman and Shimizu focus on a methodology for predicting
outcomes, the Fuzzy Inference System (FIS), in Chap. 5. The authors present an
example FIS, discuss its strengths and shortcomings, and demonstrate how its perfor-
mance can be improved with the use of Genetic Algorithms. In addition, FIS can
be further enhanced by incorporating other methodologies in Artificial Intelligence,
particularly Formal Knowledge Representation (FKR) such as a Knowledge Graph
(KG) and the Semantic Web. For example, in the Semantic Web KGs are referred to
as ontologies and support crisp knowledge and ways to infer new knowledge.
Chapter 6 by Maldonato, Muzii, Continisio and Esposito challenge psychoanal-
ysis with experimental and clinical models using neuroimaging methods to look at
questions such as how the brain generates conscious states and whether conscious-
ness involves only a limited area of the brain. The authors go even further to try
to demonstrate how neurophysiology itself shows the implausibility of a universal
morality.
In Chap. 7, Randazzo, Cirrincione and Pasero illustrate the basic ideas of a family
of neural networks for time-varying high dimensional data and demonstrate their
performance by means of synthetic and real experiments. The G-EXIN network uses
life-long learning through an anisotropic convex polytope that models the shape of
the neuron neighborhood and employs a novel kind of edge, called bridge that carries
information on the extent of the distribution time change. G-EXIN is then embedded
as a basic quantization tool for analysis of data associated with real time pattern
recognition.
Electromyography signals (EMG) widely used for monitoring joint movements
and muscles contractions is the topic of Chap. 8 by Rescio, Leone, Giampetruzzi
and Siciliano. To overcome issues associated with current wearable devices such
as expense and skin reactions, a prototype of a new smart sock equipped with
reusable stretchable and non-adhesive hybrid polymer electrolytes-based electrodes
is discussed. The smart sock can send sEMG data through a low energy wireless
transmission connection, and data are analyzed with a machine learning approach in
a case study to detect the risk of falling.
Chapter 9 by Marrone introduces the problem of defining in mathematical terms
a useful definition of vulnerability for distributed and networked systems such as
electrical networks or water supply. This definition is then mapped onto the formalism
of Bayesian Networks and demonstrated with a problem associated with smart cities
distributed plate car recognition.
Chapter 10 by Griol, Kanagal-Balakrishna and Callejas investigates communi-
cation on Twitter where users must find creative ways to express themselves using
acronyms, abbreviations, emoticons, unusual spelling, etc. due to the limit on number
of characters. They propose a Maximum Entropy classifier that uses an ensemble
8 G. Phillips-Wren et al.

of feature sets encompassing opinion lexicons, n-grams and word clusters to boost
the performance of a sentiment classifier. The authors demonstrate that using several
opinion lexicons as feature sets provides a better performance than using just one, at
the same time as adding word cluster information enriches the feature space.
Bornschlegl and Hemmje focus on handling Big Data with new techniques for
anomaly detection data access on real-world data in Chap. 11. After deriving and qual-
itatively evaluating a conceptual reference model and service-oriented architecture,
two specific industrial Big Data analysis application scenarios involving anomaly
detection on car-to-cloud data and predictive maintenance analysis on robotic sensor
data, are utilized to demonstrate the practical applicability of the model through
proof-of-concept. The techniques empower different end-user stereotypes in the
automotive and robotics application domains to gain insight from car-to-cloud as
well as from robotic sensor data.
Chapter 12 by Kilingaru, Nedic, Jain, Tweedale and Thatcher investigates Loss
of Situation Awareness (SA) in pilots as one of the human factors affecting aviation
safety. Although there has been a significant research on SA, one of the major causes
of accidents in aviation continues to be a pilot’s loss of SA perception error. However,
there is no system in place to detect these errors. Monitoring visual attention is one
of the best mechanisms to determine a pilot’s attention and, hence, perception of a
situation. Therefore, this research implements computational models to detect pilot’s
attentional behavior using ocular data during instrument flight scenario and to classify
overall attention behavior during instrument flight scenarios.
Music is the topic of Chap. 13 by Ciaramella, Nardone, Staiano and Vettigli. A
framework for processing, classification and clustering of songs on the basis of their
emotional content is presented. The main emotional features are extracted after a
pre-processing phase where both Sparse Modeling and Independent Component
Analysis based methodologies are applied. In addition, a system for music emotion
recognition based on Machine Learning and Soft Computing techniques is intro-
duced. A user can submit a target song representing their conceptual emotion and
obtain a playlist of audio songs with similar emotional content. Experimental results
are presented to show the performance of the framework.
A new data analytics paradigm is presented and applied to energy demand fore-
casting for smart cities in Chap. 14 by Alamaniotis. The paradigm integrates a
group of kernels to exploit the capabilities of deep learning algorithms by utilizing
various abstraction levels and subsequently identify patterns of interest in the data.
In particular, a deep feedforward neural network is employed with every network
node to implement a kernel machine. The architecture is used to predict the energy
consumption of groups of residents in smart cities and displays reasonably accurate
predictions.
Chapter 15 by Caroppo, Leone and Siciliano considers innovative services to
improve quality of life for ageing adults by using facial expression recognition (FER).
The authors develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to automat-
ically recognize facial expressions to reflect the mood, emotions and mental activities
of an observed subject. The method is evaluated on two benchmark datasets (FACES
and Lifespan) containing expressions of ageing adults and compared with a baseline
1 Introduction to Big Data and Data Science: Methods … 9

of two traditional machine learning approaches. Experiments showed that the CNN
deep learning approach significantly improves FER for ageing adults compared to
the baseline approaches.

1.4 Future Research Opportunities

The tremendous advances in inexpensive computing power and intelligent techniques

have opened many opportunities for managing data and investigating data in virtually
every field including engineering, science, healthcare, business, and others. Many
paradigms and applications have been proposed and used by researchers in recent
years as this book attests, and the scope of data science is expected to grow over
the next decade. These future research achievements will solve old challenges and
create new opportunities for growth and development.
However, one of the most important challenges we face today and for the foresee-
able future is ‘Security and Privacy’. We want only authorized individuals to have
access to our data. The need is growing to develop techniques where threats from
cybercriminals such as hackers can be prevented. As we become increasingly depen-
dent on digital technologies, we must prevent cybercriminals from taking control of
our systems such as autonomous cars, unmanned air vehicles, business data, banking
data, transportation systems, electrical systems, healthcare data, industrial data, and
so on. Although researchers are working on various solutions that are adaptable and
scalable to secure data and even measure the level of security, there is a long way to
go. The challenge to data science researchers is to develop systems that are secure
as well as advanced.

1.5 Conclusions

This chapter presented an overview of big data and data science to provide a context
for the chapters in this book. To provide a starting point for new researchers, we also
provided an overview of big data management and analytics methods. Finally, we
pointed out opportunities for future research.
We want to sincerely thank the contributing authors for sharing their deep research
expertise and knowledge of data science. We also thank the publishers and editors
who helped us achieve this book. We hope that both young and established researchers
find inspiration in these pages and, perhaps, connections to a new research stream in
the emerging and exciting field of data science.

Acknowledgements The research leading to these results has received funding from the EU H2020
research and innovation program under grant agreement N. 769872 (EMPATHIC) and N. 823907
(MENHIR), the project SIROBOTICS that received funding from Italian MIUR, PNR 2015-2020,
10 G. Phillips-Wren et al.

D. D. 1735, 13/07/2017, and the project ANDROIDS funded by the program V: ALERE 2019
Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, D. R. 906 del 4/10/2019, prot. n. 157264, 17/10/2019.

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Chapter 2
Towards Abnormal Behavior Detection
of Elderly People Using Big Data

Giovanni Diraco, Alessandro Leone, and Pietro Siciliano

Abstract Nowadays, smart living technologies are increasingly used to support

older adults so that they can live longer independently with minimal support of care-
givers. In this regard, there is a demand for technological solutions able to avoid
the caregivers’ continuous, daily check of the care recipient. In the age of big data,
sensor data collected by smart-living environments are constantly increasing in the
dimensions of volume, velocity and variety, enabling continuous monitoring of the
elderly with the aim to notify the caregivers of gradual behavioral changes and/or
detectable anomalies (e.g., illnesses, wanderings, etc.). The aim of this study is to
compare the main state-of-the-art approaches for abnormal behavior detection based
on change prediction, suitable to deal with big data. Some of the main challenges
deal with the lack of “real” data for model training, and the lack of regularity in the
everyday life of the care recipient. At this purpose, specific synthetic data are gener-
ated, including activities of daily living, home locations in which such activities take
place, as well as physiological parameters. All techniques are evaluated in terms of
abnormality-detection performance and lead-time of prediction, using the generated
datasets with various kinds of perturbation. The achieved results show that unsuper-
vised deep-learning techniques outperform traditional supervised/semi-supervised
ones, with detection accuracy greater than 96% and prediction lead-time of about
14 days in advance.

2.1 Introduction

Nowadays available sensing and assisted living technologies, installed in smart-living

environments, are able to collect huge amounts of data by days, months and even
years, yielding meaningful information useful for early detection of changes in behav-
ioral and/or physical state that, if left undetected, may be a high risk for frail subjects
(e.g., elderly or disabled people) whose health conditions are amenable to change.

G. Diraco (B) · A. Leone · P. Siciliano

CNR-IMM, Palazzina CNR a/3 - via Monteroni, 73100 Lecce, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 13

G. Phillips-Wren et al. (eds.), Advances in Data Science: Methodologies
and Applications, Intelligent Systems Reference Library 189,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51870-7_2
14 G. Diraco et al.

Early detection, indeed, makes it possible to alert relatives, caregivers, or health-

care personnel in advance when significant changes or anomalies are detected, and
above all before that critical levels are reached. The “big” data collected from smart
homes, therefore, offer a significant opportunity to assist people for early recognition
of symptoms that might cause more serious disorders, and so in preventing chronic
diseases. The huge amounts of data collected by different devices require automated
analysis, and thus it is of great interest to investigate and develop automatic systems
for detecting abnormal activities and behaviors in the context of elderly monitoring
[1] and smart living [2] applications.
Moreover, the long-term health monitoring and assessment can benefit from
knowledge held in long-term time series of daily activities and behaviors as well as
physiological parameters [3]. From the big data perspective, the main challenge is to
process and automatically interpret—obtaining quality information—the data gener-
ated, at high velocity (i.e., high sample rate) and volume (i.e., long-term datasets),
by a great variety of devices and sensors (i.e., structural heterogeneity of datasets),
becoming more common with the rapid advance of both wearable and ambient
sensing technologies [4].
A lot of research has been done in the general area of human behavior under-
standing, and more specifically in the area of daily activity/behavior recognition and
classification as normal or abnormal [5, 6]. However, very little work is reported in
the literature regarding the evaluation of machine learning (ML) techniques suitable
for data analytics in the context of long-term elderly monitoring in smart living envi-
ronments. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a preliminary study of the most
representative machine/deep learning techniques, by comparing them in detecting
abnormal behaviors and change prediction (CP).
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2.2 contains related works,
some background and state-of-the-art in abnormal activity and behavior detection
and CP, with special attention paid to elderly monitoring through big data collection
and analysis. Section 2.3 describes materials and methods that have been used in this
study, providing an overview of the system architecture, long-term data generation
and compared ML techniques. The findings and related discussion are presented in
Sect. 2.4. Finally, Sect. 2.5 draws some conclusions and final remarks.

2.2 Related Works and Background

Today’s available sensing technologies enable long-term continuous monitoring of

activities of daily living (ADLs) and physiological parameters (e.g., heart rate,
breathing, etc.) in the home environment. At this purpose, both wearable and ambient
sensing can be used, either alone or combined, to form multi-sensor systems [7]. In
practice, wearable motion detectors incorporate low-cost accelerometers, gyroscopes
and compasses, whereas detectors of physiological parameters are based on some
kind of skin-contact biosensors (e.g., heart and respiration rates, blood pressure, elec-
trocardiography, etc.) [8]. These sensors need to be attached to a wireless wearable
Random documents with unrelated
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connection with, anything peculiarly female, or indeed generally
sexual, has been increasingly shown to be false, until now no serious
authority on the matter can be found to espouse the old view. The
malady is now well known to attack men as well as women, and to
have no special relation to things of sex at all.[25]
Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, this
disorder was supposed to predominantly come from, or to lead to,
moral impurity, or at least to be ordinarily accompanied by strong
erotic propensions. But here the now carefully observed facts are
imperatively hostile: of the 120 living cases most carefully studied by
Prof. Janet, only four showed the predominance of any such
tendencies, a proportion undoubtedly not above the percentage to
be found amongst non-hysterical persons.[26]
And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthfulness
and deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how unfounded is this
prejudice, since it but springs from the misplaced promptitude with
which the earlier observers refused to believe what they had not as
yet sufficiently examined and could not at all explain, and from the
malady being itself equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-
up of the normal inter-connection between the several, successive or
simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the one personality.
He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no commoner among
such patients than it is among healthy persons.[27]
And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such specifically
moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of fancies and
inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that it frequently
passes into downright insanity. And this is no doubt the one
objection which does retain some of its old cogency. Still, it is well to
note that, as has now been fully established, the elements of the
human mind are and remain the same throughout the whole range
of its conditions, from the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their
proportion and admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind
of synthesis necessary to hold them together differentiate these
various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such synthesis; in
hysteria the synthesis, however slight and peculiar, is always still
traceable throughout the widespread disgregation of the elements
and states.[28] And it is this very persistence of the fundamental
unity, together with the strikingly different combination and
considerable disaggregation of its elements, that makes the study of
hysteria so fruitful for the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of
its unity; whilst the continuance of all the elements of the normal
intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it is apparently so
easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat genius and sanctity as
but so much degeneracy.
2. Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine’s case.
The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, in
Catherine’s case, are like or identical to what is observable in cases
of hysteria.
There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, which
was presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states.
“Anaesthesia,” says Prof. Janet, “can be considered as the type of
the other symptoms of hysteria; it exists in the great majority of
cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the malady. In its most
frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects one of the lateral
halves of the body, and this half is usually the left side.” Or, “a finger
or hand will be affected.” Such “insensibility can be very frequent
and very profound”; but “it disappears suddenly” and even “varies
from one moment to another.”[29]
Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-
aesthesia. “The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations,
and spasms. The painful zones have their seat mostly on the
abdomen or on the hips.” And “sensation in these states is not
painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by its quality, its
characteristics; it has become the signal, by association of ideas, for
the production of a set of extremely painful phenomena.” So, with
the colour-sense: “one patient adores the colour red, and sees in its
dullest shade ‘sparkling rays which penetrate to her very heart and
warm her through and through.’” But “another one finds this ‘a
repulsive colour and one capable of producing nausea.’” And
similarly with the senses of taste and odour.[30]
Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation, at
times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the
rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the throat or
stomach, and the curious, mentally explicable, exceptions to this
incapacity; the sense, even at other times, of strangulation; heart
palpitations, fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or
even from the lung; red patches on the skin and emotional jaundice
all over it, and one or two other peculiarities.[31]
Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine
warns her attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases
her reading, without showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to
be profoundly attentive; it is, however, but one of her attacks of
‘fixity.’ And she has promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a
few minutes, there will be no getting her out of it.”
As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary
fineness of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see
that “if one points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary
portrait upon a plain white card, and mixes this card with other
similar ones, they will almost always find again the portrait on the
same card.” And similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-
sensible perception to Marabotto’s hand alone, we find that, if M.
Janet touches Léonie’s hand, he having suggested a nosegay to her,
she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see that nosegay;
whereas, if another person touches that same hand, Léonie will see
nothing special.
As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead,
M. Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be
punished”; and R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.”
As to the hallucination of a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same
impression.[32]
 And,—perhaps the most important of all these surface-
resemblances,—there is Catherine’s apparent freedom from all
emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her
extraordinary dependence upon, and claimfulness towards, her
Confessor alone. “These patients rapidly lose the social feelings:
Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection for her brother,
ends by losing all interest in him; Marcelle, at the very beginning of
her illness, separates herself from every one.” “It is always their own
personality which dominates their thoughts.” Yet these patients have
“an extraordinary attachment to their physician. For him they are
resolved to do all things. In return, they are extremely exacting,—he
is to occupy himself entirely with each one alone. Only a very
superficial observer would ascribe this feeling to a vulgar source.”[33]
3. Catherine’s personality not disintegrated.
But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine’s case,
even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such patients; and
these facts become clearer and more numerous in precise proportion
as we move away from peripheral, psycho-physical phenomena and
mechanisms, and dwell upon her practically unbroken mental and
moral characteristics, and upon the use and meaning, the place and
context of these things within her ample life.
For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it is still she
who leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong and self-
consistent will shows itself still, under all this shifting psycho-physical
surface. Thus Don Marabotto now administers, it is true, all her
money and charitable affairs for her. But it is she who insists, alone
and unaided, upon the true spiritual function of that impression of
odour on his hand.—Vernazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the
fight against subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest
depressions. But her far more frequent times of light and joy are in
nowise occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a
purely psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if in but a
few, yet in inexhaustibly fruitful and universally applicable ideas and
experiences of a spiritual kind, such as helped to urge this friend on
to his world-renewing impulses and determinations.—Her closest
relations and friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken
eighteen months and then again two days before her death, in
getting her to desist from ordering her burial by the side of her
husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how indirectly, and, in
the other case, how suddenly and even then quite informally, they
had to gain their point.—Her attendants in general, and Marabotto in
particular, certainly paid her an engrossed attention, and the all but
endlessness of her superficial fancies and requirements have been
chronicled by them with a naïve and wearisome fulness. But then
she herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite knowledge
as to how and when to apply them, some sturdy opposition and a
greater roughness of handling would, on their part, be of the
greatest use to her, in this her psychical infirmity; indeed her
shutting herself away from Marabotto, as late as January 1510, is
directly caused by her sense and fear of being spoilt by him.
It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably
exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her
indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two brothers and
of her only sister; and that, from January 1510 onwards, she
gradually excludes all her attendants from her sick-room, with,
eventually, the sole exceptions of Marabotto or Carenzio and
Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively how persistent were her
detailed interest in, and dispositions for, the requirements of her
surviving brother, nephews, and nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl’s
hidden mother; of her priest-attendants, and of each and all of her
humblest domestics; of the natives in the far-away Greek Island of
Scios; and, above all, of the Hospital and its great work which she
had ever loved so well.
We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last week
of her life, of mentally opaque and spiritually unsuggestive and
unutilized impressions which are truly analogous to those
characteristic of hysteria. But we have also seen how forcibly these
two solitary cases bring out, by contrast, the spiritual transparency
and fruitfulness of her usual, finely reflective picturings of these last
years. For here it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which
joyously greets, and straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho-
physical occurrences; and it does so, not because these occurrences
are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites or objects of her
faith and spiritual insight, but because, on the contrary, they meet
and clothe an already exuberant faith and insight—spiritual
certainties derived from quite another source.
And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of the sick-
room can easily pall upon us, especially when presented with the
credulities and hectic exaggerations which disfigure so much of the
Vita’s description of it; we must, in justice, as I have attempted to
do in my seventh and eighth chapters, count in, as part of her
biography, her deep affection for and persistent influence with Ettore
and Battista Vernazza, and the exemplification of her doctrine by
these virile souls, makers of history in the wide, varied world of men.
[34]

In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily limited

number of ways in which the psycho-physical organism reacts under
mental stimulations, certain neural phenomena may, in any two
cases, be, in themselves, perfectly similar, although their respective
mental causes or occasions may be as different, each from the other,
as the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the
Law of Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications
of the Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the sudden
jumping of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically-disposed young
woman, or as the various causes of tears and laughter throughout
the whole world.

IV. First Period of Catherine’s Life, 1447 to 1477, in its Three

Stages.

If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its three stages
of the sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463, the first ten years of
her married life, 1463-1473, and the four years of her Conversion
and active Penitence, 1473-1477, we shall find, I think, in the matter
of temperament and psycho-physical conditions, little or nothing but
a rare degree of spiritual sensitiveness, and an extraordinary close-
knittedness of body and mind.
1. From her childhood to her conversion.
Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the Pietà
seems to have suggested religious ideas and feelings with the
suddenness and emotional solidity of a physical seizure—an
impression still undimmed when she herself recounted it, some fifty
years later, to her two intimates.—It is true that during those first,
deeply unhappy ten years of marriage, we cannot readily find more
than indications of a most profound and brooding melancholy, the
apparent result of but two factors,—a naturally sad disposition and
acutely painful domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from the
sequel, that more and other things lay behind. It is indeed evident
that she possessed a congenitally melancholy temperament; that
nothing but the rarest combination of conditions could have brought
out, into something like elastic play and varied exercise, her great
but few and naturally excessive qualities of mind and heart; that
these conditions were not only absent, but were replaced by
circumstances of the most painful kind; and that she will hardly, at
this time, have had even a moment’s clear consciousness of any
other sources than just those conditions for her deep, keen, and
ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things, her own self included:
all peace and joy, the very capacity for either seemed gone, and
gone for ever. But it is only the third stage, with its sudden-seeming
conversion on March 20, 1473, and the then following four years of
strenuously active self-immolation and dedication to the humblest
service of others, which lets us see deep into those previous years of
sullen gloom and apparently hopeless drift and dreary wastage.
The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth of the
former gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion and relation
to the capacities of that nature and to the height of their satisfaction
in the later light and vigour brought to and assimilated by them. It
was the sense, at that previous time still inarticulate, but none the
less mightily operative, of the insufficiency of all things merely
contingent, of all things taken as such and inevitably found to be
such, that had been adding, and was now discovered to have added,
a quite determining weight and poignancy to the natural pressure of
her temperament and external lot. And this temperament and lot,
which had not alone produced that sadness, could still less of
themselves remove it, whatever might be its cause. Her sense of
emptiness and impotence could indeed add to her sense of fulness
and of power, once these latter had come; but of themselves the
former could no more give her the latter, than hunger, which indeed
makes bread to taste delicious, can give us real bread and, with it,
that delight.
And it was such real bread of life and real power which now came
to her. For if the tests of reality in such things are their persistence
and large and rich spiritual applicability and fruitfulness, then
something profoundly real and important took place in the soul of
that sad and weary woman of six-and-twenty, within that Convent-
chapel, at that Annunciation-tide. Her four years of heroic
persistence; her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a century;
her lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia’s
mother; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging him on to
his splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his grand death in
plague-stricken Genoa; her daringly original, yet immensely
persuasive, doctrine,—nearly all this dates back, completely for her
consciousness and very largely in reality, to those few moments on
that memorable day.
2. Her conversion not sudden nor visionary.
But two points, concerning the manner and form of this
experience, are, though of but secondary spiritual interest, far more
difficult to decide. There is, for one thing, the indubitable
impression, for her own mind and for ours, of complete suddenness
and newness in her change. Was this suddenness and newness
merely apparent, or real as well? And should this suddenness, if real,
be taken as in itself and directly supernatural?
Now it is certain that Catherine, up to ten years before, had been
full of definitely religious acts and dispositions. Had she not, already
at thirteen, wanted to be a Nun, and, at eight or so, been deeply
moved by a picture of the dead Christ in His Mother’s lap? Hence,
ideas and feelings of self-dedication and of the Christ-God’s hatred of
sin and love for her had, in earlier and during longer times than
those of her comparative carelessness, soaked into and formed her
mental and emotional bent, and will have in so far shaped her will,
as to make the later determination along those earlier lines of its
operation, comparatively easy, even after those years of relaxation
and deviation. Yet it is clear that there was not here, as indeed there
is nowhere, any mere repetition of the past. New combinations and
an indefinitely deeper apprehension of the great religious ideas and
facts of God’s holiness and man’s weakness, of the necessity for the
soul to reach its own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God
having Himself to meet and feed this movement and hunger which
He has Himself implanted; new combinations and depths of emotion,
and an indefinite expansion and heroic determination of the will:
were all certainly here, and were new as compared with even the
most religious moments in the past.
As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part,
simply apparent,—a dim apprehension of what then became clear
having been previously quite oppressively with her. And, in any case,
this suddenness seems to belong rather to the temperamental
peculiarities and necessary forms of her particular experiences than
to the essence and content of her spiritual life. For, whatever she
thinks, feels, says or does throughout her life, she does and
experiences with actual suddenness, or at least with a sense of
suddenness; and there is clearly no more necessary connection
between such suddenness and grace and true self-renouncement,
than there is between gradualness and mere nature; both
suddenness and gradualness being but simple modes, more or less
fixed for each individual, yet differing from each to each, modes in
which God’s grace and man’s will interact and manifest themselves in
different souls.[35]
And then there is the question as to whether or not this
conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have seen, in
the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties which beset the
account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the Palace; and how the
story of the previous visionless experience in the Chapel is free from
all such objections. But, even supposing the two accounts to be
equally reliable, it is the first, the visionless experience, which was
demonstrably the more important and the more abidingly operative
of the two. More important, for it is during those visionless moments
that her conversion is first effected; and more abiding, for, according
to all the ancient accounts, the impression of the Bleeding Christ
Vision disappeared utterly at the end of at longest four years,
whereas the memory of the visionless conversion moments
remained with her, as an operative force, up to the very last. Witness
the free self-casting of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into
Love, into God (without any picturing of the historic Christ), which
forms one of the two constituents of her great latter-day teaching;
and how entirely free from directly historic elements all her recorded
visions of the middle period turn out to be.[36]
3. Peculiarities of her Active Penitence.
As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware of losing
the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous
instrumentality, in which the negative and restrictive side of of her
action stood towards the positive and expansive one. An immense
affirmation, an anticipating, creative buoyancy and resourcefulness,
had come full flood into her life; and had shifted her centre of
deliberate interest and willing away from the disordered, pleasure-
seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in which her true personality had
for so long been enmeshed. Thus all this strenuous work of
transforming and raising her lower levels of inclinations and of habit
to the likeness and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard
was not taking place for the sake of something which actually was,
or which even seemed to be, less than what she had possessed or
had, even dimly, sought before, nor with a view to her true self’s
contraction. But, on the contrary, the work was for the end of that
indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards of her soul’s centre
and widening out of its circumference, which she could herself
confirm and increase only by such ever-renewed warfare against
what she now recognized as her false and crippling self.
And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still within this
stage, her attitude became “passive.” She pretty early came to do
these numerous definite acts of penance without any deliberate
selection or full attention to them. As in her third period her
absorption in large spiritual ideas spontaneously suggests certain
corresponding psycho-physical phenomena, which then, in return,
stimulate anew the apprehensions of the mind; so here, towards the
end of the first period, penitential love ends by quite spontaneously
suggesting divers external acts of penitence, which readily become
so much fresh stimulation for love.
I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or ecstasies
—at least of the later lengthy and specific type. For the Bleeding
Christ experience, even if fully historical, occurred within the first
conversion-days, and only its vivid memory prolonged itself
throughout those penitential years; whilst all such other visions, as
have been handed down to us, do not treat of conversion and
penance, at least in any active and personal sense. And only towards
the end of these years do the psycho-physical phenomena as to the
abstention from food begin to show themselves. The consideration
of both the Visions and the Fasts had, then, better be reserved for
the great central period.

V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine’s Life, 1477 to

1499.

It is most natural yet very regrettable that we should know so little

as to Catherine’s spiritual life, or even as to her psycho-physical
condition, during these central twenty-two years of her life. It is
natural, for she had, at this time, neither Physician nor Confessor
busy with her, and the very richness and balanced fulness of this
epoch of her life may well have helped to produce but little that
could have been specially seized and registered by either. Yet it is
regrettable, since here we have what, at least for us human
observers, constitutes the culmination and the true measure of her
life, the first period looking but like the preparation, and the third
period, like the price paid for such a rich expansion.—Yet we know
something about three matters of considerable psycho-physical and
temperamental interest, which are specially characteristic of this
time: her attitude towards food; her ecstasies and visions; and
certain peculiarities in her conception and practice of the spiritual
warfare.
1. Her extraordinary fasts.
As to food, it is clear that, however much we may be able or
bound to deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid nucleus of
remarkable fact. During some twenty years she evidently went, for a
fairly equal number of days,—some thirty in Advent and some forty
in Lent, seventy in all annually,—with all but no food; and was,
during these fasts, at least as vigorous and active as when her
nutrition was normal. For it is not fairly possible to make these great
fasts end much before 1496, when she ceased to be Matron of the
Hospital; and they cannot have begun much after 1475 or 1476: so
that practically the whole of her devoted service and administration
in and of that great institution fell within these years, of which well-
nigh one-fifth was covered by these all but total abstentions from
food. Yet here again we are compelled to take these things, not
separately, and as directly supernatural, but in connection with
everything else; and to consider the resultant whole as the effect
and evidence of a strong mind and will operating upon and through
an immensely responsive psycho-physical organism.
For here again we easily find a significant system and delicate
selectiveness both in the constant approximate synchronisms—these
incapacities occurring about Advent and Lent; and in the foods
exempted—since there is no difficulty in connection with the daily
Holy Eucharist, with the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all
Communicants in that age at Genoa, immediately after Communion,
or with water when seasoned penitentially with salt or vinegar. And if
the actual heightening of nervous energy and balance, recorded as
having generally accompanied these two fasts, is indeed a striking
testimony to the extraordinary powers of her mind and will, we must
not forget that these fruitful fasts were accompanied, and no doubt
rendered possible, by the second great psychical peculiarity of these
middle years, her ecstasies.
2. Her ecstasies and visions.
It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and functions,
her fasts and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy and strength-
bringing kind, arise, persist and then fade out of her life together.
And since, in ecstasy, the respiration, the circulation, and the other
physical functions are all slackened and simplified; the mind is
occupied with fewer, simpler, larger ideas, harmonious amongst
themselves; and the emotions and the will are, for the time, saved
the conflict and confusion, the stress and strain, of the fully waking
moments; and considering that Catherine was peculiarly sensitive to
all this flux and friction, and that she was now often in a more or
less ecstatic trance from two up to eight hours: it follows that the
amount of food required to heal the breach made by life’s wear and
tear would, by these ecstasies, be considerably reduced. And indeed
it will have been these contemplative absorptions which directly
mediated for her those accessions of vigour: and that they did so, in
such a soul and for the uses to which she put this strength, is their
fullest justification as thoroughly wholesome, at least in their
ultimate outcome, in and for this particular life.
And the visions recorded have these two characteristics, that they
all deal with metaphysical realities and relations—God as source and
end of all things, as Light and food of the soul, and similar
conceptions, and never directly with historical persons, scenes, or
institutions; and that, whereas the non-ecstatic picturings of her last
period are grandly original, and demonstrably based upon her own
spiritual experience, these second-period ecstatic visions are readily
traceable to New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and Franciscan
precursors, and have little more originality than this special selection
from amongst other possible literary sources.
3. Special character of her spiritual warfare.
Catherine’s ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method of her
spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in three
maxims: “One thing, and only one at a time”; “Ever fight self, and
you need not trouble about any other foe”; and “Fight self by an
heroic indirectness and by love, for love,—through a continuous self-
donation to Pure Love alone.”
Studying here these great convictions simply in their
temperamental occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can readily
discover how the “one thing at a time” maxim springs from the same
disposition as that which found such refreshment in ecstasy. For
here too, partly from a congenital incapacity to take things lightly,
partly from an equally characteristic sensitiveness to the conflict and
confusion incident to the introduction of any fresh multiplicity into
the consciousness, she requires, even in her non-ecstatic moments,
to have her attention specially concentrated upon one all-important
idea, one point in the field of consciousness. And, by a faithful
wholeness of attention to the successive spiritually significant
circumstances and obligations, interior impressions and lights, which
her praying, thinking, suffering, actively bring round to her notice,
she manages, by such single steps, gradually to go a very long way,
and, by such severe successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity.
For each of these faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized acts
and states, received into her one ever-growing and deepening
personality, leave memories and stimulations behind them, and
mingle, as subconscious elements, with the conscious acts which
follow later on.
4. Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare.
 There were two specially remarkable consequences of this
constant watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant point in
each congeries of circumstances, and of the manner in which (partly
perhaps as the occasion, but probably in great part as the effect of
this attention) one interior condition of apparent fixity would
suddenly shift to another condition of a different kind but of a similar
apparent stability. There was the manner in which, during these
years, she appears to have escaped the committing of any at all
definite offences against the better and best lights of that particular
moment; and there was the way in which she would realize the
faultiness and subtle self-seeking of any one state, only at the
moment of its disappearing to make room for another.
I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities to be
substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had not obtained,
we should have found her practising more or less frequent
Confession, as we find her doing in the first and third, but not in this
period; and if the second condition had not existed, we should have
had, for this period also, some such vivid account of painful scruples
arising from the impression of actually present unfaithfulnesses,
such as has been preserved for her last years. And indeed, as soon
as we have vividly conceived a state in which a soul (by a wise
utilization of the quite exceptional successiveness and simplification
to which it has been, in great part, driven by its temperamental
requirements, and by a constant heroic watchfulness) has managed
to exclude from its life, during a long series of years, all fully
deliberate resistances to, or lapses from, its contemporaneous better
insight: one sees at once that a consciousness of faultiness could
come to her only at those moments when, one state and level giving
place to another, she could, for the moment, see the former habits
and their implicit defects in the clear light of their contrast to her
new, deeper insights and dispositions.
Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the curious
quasi-fixity of each state, and then the sudden replacement of it by
another) something which, taken alone, is simply psychically peculiar
and spiritually indifferent. The persistent sense of gradual or of rapid
change in the midst of a certain continuity and indeed abidingness,
characteristic of the average moments of the average soul, is, taken
in itself, more true to life and to the normal reaction of the human
mind, and not less capable of spiritual utilization, than is Catherine’s
peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her special psychic life for
purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in which, as we shall find in
a later chapter, she succeeded in moulding this life into a shape
representative of certain great spiritual truths: these things it is
which constitute here the spiritually significant element.
And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her great
simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat.
Simplification: for she does not fight directly either the Devil or the
World; she directly fights the “Flesh” alone, and recognizes but one
immediate opponent, her own lower self. Hence the references to
the world are always simply as to an extension or indefinite
repetition of that same self, or of similar lower selves; and those to
the devil are, except where she declares her own lower self “a very
devil,” extraordinarily rare, and, in their authentic forms, never
directly and formally connected with her own spiritual interests and
struggles. And Intensification: for she conceives this lower self,
against which all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity,
as actually cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise, and
as more or less vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming of her
states and acts.
And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence of her
special temperament and psycho-physical functioning, yet in a
direction opposite to that in which we would naturally expect it. For
it is not so much that this temperament led her to exaggerate the
badness of her false self, or to elaborate a myth concerning its (all
but completely separate) existence, as that, owing in large part to
that temperament and functioning, her false self was both unusually
distinct from her true self and particularly clamorous and claimful. It
would indeed be well for hagiography if, in all cases, at least an
attempt were made to discover and present the precise and
particular good and bad selves, worked for and fought by the
particular saint: for it is just this double particularization of the
common warfare in every individual soul that gives the poignant
interest and instructiveness, and a bracing sense of reality to these
lonely yet typical, unique yet universal struggles, defeats, and
victories.
And in Catherine’s case her special temperament; her particular
attitude during the ten years’ laxity, and again during the last years’
times of obscurity and scruple; even some of her sayings probably
still belonging to this middle period; but above all the precise point
and edge of her counter-ideal and attrait: all indicate clearly enough
what was her congenital defect. A great self-engrossment of a
downrightly selfish kind; a grouping of all things round such a self-
adoring Ego; a noiseless but determined elimination from her life
and memory of all that would not or could not, then and there, be
drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of this
immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded, endlessly
self-doctoring “I” and “Me”: a self intensely, although not sexually,
jealous, envious and exacting, incapable of easy accommodation, of
pleasure in half successes, of humour and brightness, of joyous
“once-born” creatureliness: all this was certainly to be found, in
strong tendency at least, in the untrained parts and periods of her
character and life.
And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her psycho-
physical organism which, in her last period, ended by mirroring her
mental spiritual apprehensions and picturings in her very body, and
which, even at this time, has been traced by us in the curious long
fixities and rapid changes of her fields of consciousness, clearly
operates also and already here, in separating off this false self from
the good one and in heightening the apprehension of that false self
to almost a perception in space, or to an all but physical sensation.
We thus get something of which the interesting cases of
“doubleness of personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it
were, purely psychical, definitely maladif caricatures; the great
difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, at all times, the
consciousness and memory of both sides, of both “selves,” and of
each as both actual and potential, within the range of her one great
personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus englobed and
utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and
sanctity.[37]
5. Precise object and end of her striving.
And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted, by the
precise object of her ideal, the particular means and special end of
the struggle. Here, at the very culmination of her inner life and aim,
we find the deepest traces of her temperamental requirements; and
here, in what she seeks, there is again an immense concentration
and a significant choice. The distinctions between obligation and
supererogation, between merit and grace, are not utilized but
transcended; the conception of God having anger as well as love
arouses as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God’s envy
aroused in Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself, continuously
loving.
This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, and, of
Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The dispositions of souls are
indeed held to vary within each soul and between soul and soul, and
to determine the differences in their reception, and consequently in
the effect upon them, of God’s one universal love: but the soul’s
reward and punishment are not something distinct from its state,
they are but that very state prolonged and articulated, since man
can indeed go against his deepest requirements but can never finally
suppress them. Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not places as well
as states, nor do they begin only in the beyond: they are states
alone, and begin already here. And Grace and Love, and Love and
Christ, and Christ and Spirit, and hence Grace and Love and Christ
and Spirit are, at bottom, one, and this One is God. Hence God,
loving Himself in and through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in
this constant stretching out and forward of her whole being into and
towards the ocean of light and love, of God the All in All, it is not
hard to recognize a soul which finds happiness only when looking
out and away from self, and turning, in more or less ecstatic
contemplation and action, towards that Infinite Country, that great
Over-Againstness, God.
And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry God, we
find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally prone itself to
angry claimfulness, and which had been too much driven out of its
self-occupation by the painful sense of interior self-division
consequent upon that jealousy, not to find it intolerable to get out of
that little Scylla of her own hungry self only to fall into a great
Charybdis, an apparent mere enlargement and canonization of that
same self, in the angry God Himself.
And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon
an unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an
element of at least relative Rigorism and contraction into her
spirituality, this third peculiarity brings a compensating movement of
quasi-Pantheism, of immense expansion. Here the crushed plant
expands in boundless air, light and warmth; the parched seaweed
floats and unfolds itself in an immense ocean of pure waters—the
soul, as it were, breathes and bathes in God’s peace and love. And it
is evident that the great super-sensible realities and relations
adumbrated by such figures, did not, with her, lead to mere dry or
vague apprehensions. Even in this period, although here with a
peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony, the reality thus long and
closely dwelt on and lived with was, as it were, physically seen and
felt in these its images by a ready response of her immensely docile
psycho-physical organism.
6. Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions apparently
necessary for stigmatization.
And in this connection we should note how largely reasonable was
the expectation of some of her disciples of finding some permanent
physical effects upon her body; and yet why she not only had not
the stigmata of the Passion, but why she could not have them. For,
of the three apparently necessary conditions for such stigmatization,
she had indeed two—a long and intense absorption in religious
ideas, and a specially sensitive psycho-physical temperament and
organization of the ecstatic type; but the third condition, the
concentration of that absorption upon Our Lord’s Passion and
wounds, was wholly wanting—at least after those four actively
penitential and during those twenty-two ecstatic years. We can,
however, say most truly that although, since at all events 1477, her
visions and contemplations were all concerning purely metaphysical,
eternal realities, or certain ceaselessly repeated experiences of the
human soul, or laws and types derived from the greatest of Christian
institutions, her daily solace, the Holy Eucharist: yet that these
verities ended by producing definite images in her senses, and
certain observable though passing impressions upon her body, so
that we can here talk of sensible shadows or “stigmata” of things
purely spiritual and eternal.
And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental pathologists of
a more or less materialistic type have, at times, shown excessive
suspicion as to some of the causes and effects of these saints’
devotion to Our Lord’s Humanity under the imagery and categories
of the Canticle of Canticles—all such suspicions, fair or unfair, have
absolutely no foothold in Catherine’s life, since not only is there here
no devotion to God or to Our Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal soul:
there is no direct contemplative occupation with the historic Christ
and no figuring of Him or of God under human attributes or relations
at all. I think that her temperament and health had something to do
with her habitual dwelling upon Thing-symbols of God: Ocean—Air—
Fire—picturings which, conceived with her psycho-physical vividness,
must, in their expanse, have rested and purified her in a way that
historical contingencies and details would not have done. The
doctrinal and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later
on.

VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations between

Psycho-physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in general.
 If we next inquire how matters stand historically with regard to
the relations between ecstatic states and psycho-physical
peculiarities on the one hand, and sanctity in general on the other
hand, we shall find, I think, that the following three rules or laws
really cover, in a necessarily general, somewhat schematic way, all
the chief points, at all certain or practically important, in this
complex and delicate matter.
1. Intense spiritual energising is accompanied by auto-suggestion
and mono-ideism.
It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every mental,
emotional, and volitional energizing is necessarily and always
accompanied by corresponding nerve-states, and that if we had not
some neural sensitiveness and neural adaptability, we could not—
whilst living our earthly life—think, or feel, or will in regard to
anything whatsoever: a certain special degree of at least potential
psycho-physical sensitiveness and adaptability must be taken to be,
not the productive cause, but a necessary condition for the exercise,
of any considerable range and depth of mind and will, and hence of
sanctity in general; and that the actual aiming at, and gradual
achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely possible cases,
spiritualizes and further defines this sensitiveness, as the instrument,
material, and expression of the soul’s work.[38] And this work of the
heroic soul will necessarily consist, in great part, in attending to,
calling up, and, as far as may be, both fixing and ever renovating
certain few great dominant ideas, and in attempting by every means
to saturate the imagination with images and figures, historical and
symbolic, as so many incarnations of these great verities.
We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without as yet
any inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon the soul,—a
divine stimulation underlying all its sincere and fruitful action,—is a
spiritual mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, of a more or less general
kind. But, at this stage, these activities and their psycho-physical
concomitants and results will, though different in kind, be no more
abnormal than is the mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the
mathematician, the tactician, and the constructive statesman.
Newton, Napoleon, and Richelieu: they were all dominated by some
great central idea, and they all for long years dwelt upon it and
worked for it within themselves, till it became alive and aflame in
their imaginations and their outward-moving wills, before, yet as the
means of, its taking external and visible shape. And, in all the cases
that we can test in detail, the psycho-physical accompaniments of all
this profound mental-volitional energy were most marked. In the
cases of Newton and Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their
energizings solely according to their neural accompaniments would
force us to class these great discoverers and organizers amongst
psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the truth and value of their work and
character has, of course, to be measured, not by this its neural
fringe and cost, but by its central spiritual truth and fruitfulness.
2. Such mechanisms specially marked in Philosophers, Musicians,
Poets, and Mystical Religionists.
The mystical and contemplative element in the religious life, and
the group of saints amongst whom this element is predominant, no
doubt give us a still larger amount of what, again taking the matter
phenomenally and not ultimately, is once more mono-ideism and
auto-suggestion, and entails a correspondingly larger amount of
psycho-physical impressionableness and reaction utilized by the
mind. But here also, from the simplest forms of the “prayer of quiet”
to absorptions of an approximately ecstatic type, we have something
which, though different in kind and value, is yet no more abnormal
than are the highest flights and absorptions of the Philosopher, the
Musician, and the Poet. And yet, in such cases as Kant and
Beethoven, a classifier of humanity according to its psycho-physical
phenomena alone would put these great discoverers and creators,
without hesitation, amongst hopeless and useless hypochondriacs.
Yet here again the truth of their ideas and the work of their lives
have to be measured by quite other things than by this their neural
concomitance and cost.
3. Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization.
 The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions
have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and
neural constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely
peculiar psycho-physical organization. We have traced it in Catherine
and indicated it in St. Teresa. We find it again in St. Maria Magdalena
dei Pazzi and in St. Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times,
and in St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval
times. For early Christian times we are too ignorant as regards the
psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Hermas, and
St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a connection between their
temperamental endowments and their hearing of voices and seeing
of visions—in the last two cases we get much that looks like more or
less of a mere conventional literary device.[39]
We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical and
thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8, after speaking
of the abundant revelations accorded to him, he adds that “lest I be
lifted up, a thorn” (literally, a stake) “in the flesh was given to me,
an Angel of Satan to buffet me.” And though “I thrice besought the
Lord that it might depart from me, the Lord answered me, ‘My grace
is sufficient for thee; for grace is perfected in infirmity.’” And he was
consequently determined “rather” to “glory in his infirmities, so that
the power of Christ may dwell within” him. And in Gal. iv, 14, 15,
written about the same time, he reminds his readers how he had
“preached to them through the infirmity of the flesh,” commending
them because they “did not despise nor loathe their temptation in
his flesh” (this is no doubt the correct reading), “but had received
him as an Angel of God, as Christ Jesus.”
Now the most ancient interpretation of this “thorn” or “stake” is
some kind of bodily complaint,—violent headache or earache is
mentioned by Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and by St. Jerome, Comm.
in Gal. loc. cit. Indeed St. Paul’s own description of his “bodily
presence” as “weak,” and his “spoken word” as “contemptible” (2
Cor. x, 10), points this way. It seems plain that it cannot have been
carnal temptations (only in the sixth century did this interpretation
become firmly established), for he could not have gloried in these,
nor could they, hidden as they would be within his heart, have
exposed him to the contempt of others. Indeed he expressly
excludes such troubles from his life, where, in advising those who
were thus oppressed to marry, he gives the preference to the single
life, and declares, “I would that all men were even as myself” (1 Cor.
vii, 7).
The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful: note the
metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and the Angel of Satan
who buffeted him. (And compare St. Teresa’s account: “An Angel of
God appeared to me to be thrusting at times a long spear into my
heart and to pierce my very entrails”; “the pain was so great that it
made me moan”; “it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were
thrust through the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one of
sense, neither is the wound physical”; and how, on another
occasion, she heard Our Lord answer her: “Serve thou Me, and
meddle not with this.”)[40]
These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of his
public ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of derision and of
loathing. (Compare here St. Teresa’s declaration: “During the
rapture, the body is very often perfectly powerless; it continues in
the position it was in when the rapture came upon it: if sitting,
sitting; if the hands were open, or if they were shut, they will remain
open or shut”; “if the body” was “standing or kneeling, it remains
so.”)[41]
Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both in fact
and in his consciousness, with his Visions; and they were recurrent.
The vision of the Third Heaven and his apparently first attack seem
to have been practically coincident,—about a.d. 44. We find a second
attack hanging about him for some time, on his first preaching in
Galatia, about a.d. 51 or 52 (see 1 Thess. ii, 18; 1 Cor. ii, 3). And a
third attack appears to have come in a.d. 57 or 58, when the Second
Epistle to the Corinthians and that to the Galatians were written;
note the words (2 Cor. i, 9), “But” (in addition to his share in the
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