A comparative study on machine learning algorithms for indoor positioning

Fingerprinting based positioning is commonly used for indoor positioning. In this method, initially a radio map is created using Received Signal Strength (RSS) values that are measured from predefined reference points. During the positioning, the best match between the observed RSS values and existing RSS values in the radio map is established as the predicted position. In the positioning literature, machine learning algorithms have widespread usage in estimating positions. One of the main problems in indoor positioning systems is to find out appropriate machine learning algorithm. In this paper, selected machine learning algorithms are compared in terms of positioning accuracy and computation time. In the experiments, UJIIndoorLoc indoor positioning database is used. Experimental results reveal that k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm is the most suitable one during the positioning. Additionally, ensemble algorithms such as AdaBoost and Bagging are applied to improve the decision tree classifier performance nearly same as k-NN that is resulted as the best classifier for indoor positioning.