Indexing Multivariate Mobile Data through Spatio-Temporal Event Detection and Clustering

• Main Authors: Reza Rawassizadeh, Chelsea Dobbins, Mohammad Akbari, Michael Pazzani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-01-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: spatio-temporal; clustering; event detection; mobile sensing: contrast behavior mining; human behavior
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/3/448

Mobile and wearable devices are capable of quantifying user behaviors based on their contextual sensor data. However, few indexing and annotation mechanisms are available, due to difficulties inherent in raw multivariate data types and the relative sparsity of sensor data. These issues have slowed the development of higher level human-centric searching and querying mechanisms. Here, we propose a pipeline of three algorithms. First, we introduce a spatio-temporal event detection algorithm. Then, we introduce a clustering algorithm based on mobile contextual data. Our spatio-temporal clustering approach can be used as an annotation on raw sensor data. It improves information retrieval by reducing the search space and is based on searching only the related clusters. To further improve behavior quantification, the third algorithm identifies contrasting events <i>within</i>a cluster content. Two large real-world smartphone datasets have been used to evaluate our algorithms and demonstrate the utility and resource efficiency of our approach to <i>search</i>.