Finding a density peak / cluster centrum in 2D grid / point process

Question

I have a dataset with minute by minute GPS coordinates recorded by a persons cellphone. I.e. the dataset has 1440 rows with LON/LAT values. Based on the data I would like a point estimate (lon/lat value) of where the participants home is. Let's assume that home is the single location where they spend most of their time in a given 24h interval. Furthermore, the GPS sensor most of the time has quite high accuracy, however sometimes it is completely off resulting in gigantic outliers.

I think the best way to go about this is to treat it as a point process and use 2D density estimation to find the peak. Is there a native way to do this in R? I looked into kde2d (MASS) but this didn't really seem to do the trick. Kde2d creates a 25x25 grid of the data range with density values. However, in my data, the person can easily travel 100 miles or more per day, so these blocks are generally too large of an estimate. I could narrow them down and use a much larger grid but I am sure there must be a better way to get a point estimate.

Answer 1

There are "time spent" functions in the trip package (I'm the author). You can create objects from the track data that understand the underlying track process over time, and simply process the points assuming straight line segments between fixes. If "home" is where the largest value pixel is, i.e. when you break up all the segments based on the time duration and sum them into cells, then it's easy to find it. A "time spent" grid from the tripGrid function is a SpatialGridDataFrame with the standard sp package classes, and a trip object can be composed of one or many tracks.

Using rgdal you can easily transform coordinates to an appropriate map projection if lon/lat is not appropriate for your extent, but it makes no difference to the grid/time-spent calculation of line segments.

There is a simple speedfilter to remove fixes that imply movement that is too fast, but that is very simplistic and can introduce new problems, in general updating or filtering tracks for unlikely movement can be very complicated. (In my experience a basic time spent gridding gets you as good an estimate as many sophisticated models that just open up new complications). The filter works with Cartesian or long/lat coordinates, using tools in sp to calculate distances (long/lat is reliable, whereas a poor map projection choice can introduce problems - over short distances like humans on land it's probably no big deal).

(The function tripGrid calculates the exact components of the straight line segments using pixellate.psp, but that detail is hidden in the implementation).

In terms of data preparation, trip is strict about a sensible sequence of times and will prevent you from creating an object if the data have duplicates, are out of order, etc. There is an example of reading data from a text file in ?trip, and a very simple example with (really) dummy data is:

library(trip)
d <- data.frame(x = 1:10, y = rnorm(10), tms = Sys.time() + 1:10, id = gl(1, 5))
coordinates(d) <- ~x+y
tr <- trip(d, c("tms", "id"))
g <- tripGrid(tr)

pt <- coordinates(g)[which.max(g$z), ]
image(g, col = c("transparent", heat.colors(16)))
lines(tr, col = "black")
points(pt[1], pt[2], pch = "+", cex = 2)

That dummy track has no overlapping regions, but it shows that finding the max point in "time spent" is simple enough.