A universal Wi-Fi fingerprint localization method based on machine learning and sample differences

Abstract Wi-Fi technology has become an important candidate for localization due to its low cost and no need of additional installation. The Wi-Fi fingerprint-based positioning is widely used because of its ready hardware and acceptable accuracy, especially with the current fingerprint localization algorithms based on Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). However, there exists two challenges. Firstly, the traditional ML methods train a specific classification model for each scene; therefore, it is hard to deploy and manage it on the cloud. Secondly, it is difficult to train an effective multi-classification model by using a small number of fingerprint samples. To solve these two problems, a novel binary classification model based on the samples’ differences is proposed in this paper. We divide the raw fingerprint pairs into positive and negative samples based on each pair’s distance. New relative features (e.g., sort features) are introduced to replace the traditional pair features which use the Media Access Control (MAC) address and Received Signal Strength (RSS). Finally, the boosting algorithm is used to train the classification model. The UJIndoorLoc dataset including the data from three different buildings is used to evaluate our proposed method. The preliminary results show that the floor success detection rate of the proposed method can reach 99.54% (eXtreme Gradient Boosting, XGBoost) and 99.22% (Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, GBDT), and the positioning error can reach 3.460 m (XGBoost) and 4.022 m (GBDT). Another important advantage of the proposed algorithm is that the model trained by one building’s data can be well applied to another building, which shows strong generalizable ability.