Graph-based learning for building prediction in Smart Cities

Abstract

Anticipating pedestrians’ activity is a necessary task for providing a safe and energy efficient environment in an urban area. By locating strategically sensors throughout the city useful information could be obtained. By knowing the average activity of those throughout different days of the week we could identify the typology of the buildings neighboring those sensors. For these type of purposes, clustering methods show great capability forming groups of items that have great similarity intra clusters and dissimilarity inter cluster. Different approaches are made to classify sensors depending on the typology of buildings surrounding them and the mean pedestrians’ counts for different time intervals. By this way, sensors could be classified in different groups according to their activation patterns and the environment in which they are located through clustering processes and using graph convolutional networks. This study reveals that there is a close relationship between the activity pattern of the pedestrians’ and the type of environment sensors that collect pedestrians’ data are located. By this way, institutions could alleviate a great amount of effort needed to ensure safe and energy efficient urban areas, only knowing the typology of buildings of an urban zone.