Identifying Highly Dense Areas from Raw Location Data

In this paper we show how very high-volumes of raw WiFi-based location data of individuals can be used to identify dense activity locations within a neighbourhood. Key to our methods is the inference of the size of the area directly from the data, without having to use additional geographical information. To extract the density information, data-mining and machine learning techniques form activity-based transportation modelling are applied. These techniques are demonstrated on data from a large-scale experiment conducted in Singapore in which tens of thousands of school children carried a multi-sensor device for five consecutive days. By applying the techniques we were able to identify expected high-density areas of school pupils, specifically their school locations, using only the raw data, demonstrating the general applicability of the methods.

Keywords. Machine Learning, Big-data, Location-analysis.

Identifying Highly Dense Areas from Raw Location Data
Willemse EJ, Tunçer B & Bouffanais R
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA 2019), Auckland, New Zealand, 805-814, 2019. [pdf]