An indoor and outdoor positioning using a hybrid of support vector machine and deep neural network algorithms

Indoor and outdoor positioning lets to offer universal location services in industry and academia. Wi-Fi and Global Positioning System (GPS) are the promising technologies for indoor and outdoor positioning, respectively. However, Wi-Fi-based positioning is less accurate due to the vigorous changes of environments and shadowing effects. GPS-based positioning is also characterized by much cost, highly susceptible to the physical layouts of equipment, power-hungry, and sensitive to occlusion. In this paper, we propose a hybrid of support vector machine (SVM) and deep neural network (DNN) to develop scalable and accurate positioning in Wi-Fi-based indoor and outdoor environments. In the positioning processes, we primarily construct real datasets from indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi-based environments. Secondly, we apply linear discriminate analysis (LDA) to construct a projected vector that uses to reduce features without affecting information contents. Thirdly, we construct a model for positioning through the integration of SVM and DNN. Fourthly, we use online datasets from unknown locations and check the missed radio signal strength (RSS) values using the feed-forward neural network (FFNN) algorithm to fill the missed values. Fifthly, we project the online data through an LDA-based projected vector. Finally, we test the positioning accuracies and scalabilities of a model created from a hybrid of SVM and DNN. The whole processes are implemented using Python 3.6 programming language in the TensorFlow framework. The proposed method provides accurate and scalable positioning services in different scenarios. The results also show that our proposed approach can provide scalable positioning, and 100% of the estimation accuracies are with errors less than 1 m and 1.9 m for indoor and outdoor positioning, respectively.