LOCATER: Cleaning WiFi Connectivity Datasets for Semantic Localization

Abstract

This paper explores the data cleaning challenges that arise in using WiFi connectivity data to locate users to semantic indoor locations such as buildings, regions, rooms. WiFi connectivity data consists of sporadic connections between devices and nearby WiFi accesspoints (APs), each of which may cover a relatively large area withina building. Our system, entitled semantic LOCATion cleanER (LOCATER), postulates semantic localization as a series of data cleaning tasks - first, it treats the problem of determining the AP to which adevice is connected between any two of its connection events as a missing value detection and repair problem. It then associates the device with the semantic subregion (e.g., a conference room in the region) by postulating it as a location disambiguation problem. LOCATER uses a bootstrapping semi-supervised learning method for coarse localization and a probabilistic method to achieve finer localization. The paper shows that LOCATER can achieve significantly high accuracy at both the coarse and fine levels.

Publication
VLDB Endowment, Volume 14, 2020-2021