A Topological Approach to Understanding Location-Based Data

Asilomar 2018Location-based services have seen a boon in data production recently which has simultaneously stoked the research community to better understand this type of information. Tra- ditional methods in analyzing such data require significant a priori understanding of the organization of the data. We submit that the nascent field of topological data analysis (TDA) may be able to contribute new insights to analysis of such data without the aforementioned requirement. To this end, we propose two novel methods of embedding such data in order to leverage the expressive power of TDA. To demonstrate its effectiveness we apply the embeddings to maritime automated information system data