Identifying meaningful places – the nonparametric way
Petteri Nurmi and Sourav Bhattacharya
In: Pervasive 2008, 19-22 May 2008, Sydney, Australia.
Gathering and analyzing location data is an important part of many ubiquitous computing applications. The most common way to represent location information is to use numerical coordinates, e.g., latitudes and longitudes. A problem with this approach is that numerical coordinates are usually meaningless to a user and they contrast with the way humans refer to locations in daily communication. Instead of using coordinates, humans tend to use descriptive statements about their location; for example, ”I’m home” or ”I’m at Starbucks.” Locations, to which a user can attach meaningful and descriptive semantics, are often called places. In this paper we focus on the automatic extraction of places from discontinuous GPS measurements. We describe and evaluate a non-parametric Bayesian approach for identifying places from this kind of data. The main novelty of our approach is that the algorithm is fully automated and does not require any parameter tuning. Another novel aspect of our algorithm is that it can accurately identify places without temporal information. We evaluate our approach using data that has been gathered from different users and different geographic areas. The traces that we use exhibit different characteristics and contain data from daily life as well as from traveling abroad. We also compare our algorithm against the popular k-means algorithm. The results indicate that our method can accurately identify meaningful places from a variety of location traces and that the algorithm is robust against noise.