WiDE: WiFi Distance Based Group Profiling Via Machine Learning

We develop WiDE, a WiFi-distance estimation based group profiling system using LightGBM. Given the uploaded WiFi information by users, WiDE can automatically learn powerful hidden features from the proposed features for between-user distance estimation, and infer group membership with the estimated distance. For each group, WiDE classifies the mobility level, and recognizes the group structure by applying the multi-dimensional scaling technique on the matrix of distance between pairwise users within the same group. We first validate the performance of between-user distance estimation via conducting extensive experiments in a three-floor campus building and a shopping center, and the results show that WiDE outperforms other machine learning based approaches for between-user distance estimation, with the average absolute error (AAE) of 0.69m and 1.14m for the campus building and shopping center, respectively, and the corridor identification accuracy for the campus building is over 99 percent. In addition, the experiments in the shopping center show that our approach can accurately detect groups, classify group mobility into fine-grained level and recognize the group structure.