Transferred Knowledge Aided Positioning via Global and Local Structural Consistency Constraints

The fluctuation of received signal strength (RSS) induced by changing environment is the main hindrance from practical applications of the fingerprint-based indoor positioning methods. Transfer learning can mitigate the fluctuation of RSS by transferring knowledge from a source domain (off-line RSS data) to a target domain (online RSS data). However, the existing transfer learning approaches do not fully take into account the full constraints in Global and LOcal Structural conSistency (GLOSS), thus resulting in insufficient knowledge transfer. To overcome the above drawback, we propose a Transferred knowlEdge-Aided POsiTioning (TEAPOT) approach via GLOSS constraints in this paper. TEAPOT imposes the global structural consistency by minimizing the differences between the marginal and conditional distributions of the source and target domains and maximizing the samples variance in a latent subspace. Simultaneously, it also imposes the local structural consistency by minimizing within class variance and maximizing between class variance to retain the source discriminative information and preserving the local neighborhood relationship by using manifold regularization. Furthermore, a nonlinear TEAPOT is derived to improve the ability of TEAPOT to alleviate the limitation of linear projection. Compared with the existing methods, two of our proposed TEAPOT approaches via GLOSS constraints show higher accuracy and better ability in handling out-of-sample generalization. The experimental results verify that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing methods.