Abstract Traditional action recognition methods aim to recognize actions with complete observations/executions. However, it is often diffificult to capture fully executed actions due to occlusions, interruptions, etc. Meanwhile, action prediction/recognition in advance based on partial observations is essential for preventing the situation from deteriorating. Besides, fast spotting human activities using partially observed data is a critical ingredient for retrieval systems. Inspired by the recent success of data binarization in effifi- cient retrieval/recognition, we propose a novel approach, named Partial Reconstructive Binary Coding (PRBC), for action analysis based on limited frame glimpses during any period of the complete execution. Specififically, we learn discriminative compact binary codes for partial actions via a joint learning framework, which collaboratively tackles feature reconstruction as well as binary coding. We obtain the solution to PRBC based on a discrete alternating iteration algorithm. Extensive experiments on four realistic action datasets in terms of three tasks (i.e., partial action retrieval, recognition and prediction) clearly show the superiority of PRBC over the state-of-the-art methods, along with significantly reduced memory load and computational costs during the online test