Identifying highly dense areas from raw location data

Abstract

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.