Discovering Human Routines from Cell Phone Data with Topic Models

• IDIAP, 2008

We present a framework to automatically discover people's routines from information extracted by cell phones. The framework is built from a probabilistic topic model learned on novel bag type representations of activity-related cues (location, proximity and their temporal variations over a day) of peoples' daily routines. Using real-life data from the Reality Mining dataset, covering 68 000+ hours of human activities, we can successfully discover location-driven (from cell tower connections) and proximity-driven (from Bluetooth information) routines in an unsupervised manner. The resulting topics meaningfully characterize some of the underlying co-occurrence structure of the activities in the dataset, including ``going to work early/late", ``being home all day", ``working constantly", ``working sporadically" and ``meeting at lunch time".

Reference

• LIDIAP-REPORT-2008-030
• URL: http://publications.idiap.ch/downloads/reports/2008/farrahi-idiap-rr-08-32.pdf

Record created on 2010-02-11, modified on 2017-05-10