Detecting activity locations from raw GPS data: a novel kernel-based algorithm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Health studies and mHealth applications are increasingly resorting to tracking technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to study the relation between mobility, exposures, and health. GPS tracking generates large sets of geographic data that need to be transformed to be useful for health research. This paper proposes a method to test the performance of activity place detection algorithms, and compares the performance of a novel kernel-based algorithm with a more traditional time-distance cluster detection method. METHODS: A set of 750 artificial GPS tracks containing three stops each were generated, with various levels of noise.. A total of 9,000 tracks were processed to measure the algorithms' capacity to detect stop locations and estimate stop durations, with varying GPS noise and algorithm parameters. RESULTS: The proposed kernel-based algorithm outperformed the traditional algorithm on most criteria associated to activity place detection, and offered a stronger resilience to GPS noise, managing to detect up to 92.3% of actual stops, and estimating stop duration within 5% error margins at all tested noise levels. CONCLUSIONS: Capacity to detect activity locations is an important feature in a context of increasing use of GPS devices in health and place research. While further testing with real-life tracks is recommended, testing algorithms' performance with artificial track sets for which characteristics are controlled is useful. The proposed novel algorithm outperformed the traditional algorithm under these conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".