The Analysis of Feature Selection with Machine Learning for Indoor Positioning

Abstract

Indoor positioning is useful in various venues including warehouses, convention centers, malls, airports, nursing homes. In these scenarios, reducing the complexity of location estimation both improves responsiveness and helps to elongate battery life of the mobile device. In this work, we carry out a detailed analysis of the impact of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the computational complexity and accuracy with different machine learning algorithms on a large data set containing 520 APs. We compare the algorithms' training and testing times, as well as their accuracies in the presence and absence of PCA. Our results show that (i) PCA significantly reduces both the training and testing times for classification and regression using k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms while preserving if not improving accuracy, (ii) PCA slightly improves the training/testing times for regression using multi-layer perceptron (MLP), (iii) random forest (RF) does not perform well with PCA.