Where you go is who you are: understanding people's activities by places visited

The increasing availability of people traces - collected by portable devices - poses new possibilities and challenges for the study of people mobile behaviour. However, the raw data produced by such portable devices is poor from a semantic point of view, thus the gap between the person's activity and the raw collected data generated by the activity is still too wide. The work presented in this paper aims to define an algorithm to understand the activity of a moving person from the sequence of places she visited. The contribution is twofold. On one hand, an algorithm to associate each stop of the traveling person to a list of probable visited places is introduced. On the other hand, the obtained sequence of places is classified into a possible activity performed by the moving person. Preliminary experimental results on a dataset of people moving by car in the city of Milan are reported.