Combining Symbolic and Statistical Knowledge for Goal Recognition in Smart Home Environments

This work addresses the problem of goal recognition in smart home environments. We investigate whether approaches for the plan recognition problem, which is a long-standing research area in the Artificial Intelligence community, can also be applied to the goal recognition problem in smart home environments. Therefore, we evaluate the application of a well-known symbolic plan recognition approach, which is based on classical planning methods, and propose to extend this approach through additional statistical knowledge to overcome some identified shortcomings of the planning-based approach. We show that the planning-based plan recognition approach indeed can be used to solve the goal recognition problem in smart home environments and show that the proposed extension outperforms the original approach as well as purely statistical goal recognition methods.