IOT_Simulation

Aim of this project was to simulate FitBit data on a large scale to for testing SparkStreaming application and capture the latency of 3 such pipelines.

1. Real Time Pipeline
2. Near-Real Time Pipeline
3. Lambda Architecture Pipeline (Batch + Stream Processing)

This is repository is primarily meant for the simulator. Recently I have added a few of the data analysis methodologies as well to get an overview of the dataset as well as visualize the plausible extent of use of this simulator.

Here I have shown only two methods of data clustering:-

1. DBSCAN

   • Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise or DBSCAN is a density-based clustering algorithm. The reason why I have used this is because, unlike KMeans, this methods does not require a pre-existing number of clusters as its argument and it has a notion of 'noise' in data. This method however has one massive disadvantage - distance between points is measured as the Euclidean distance between them. In case of higher dimensional data, this method can be rendered useless. But for our test case, this method does provide meaningful insights.

2. K-Means Clustering

   • K-Means clustering is one of the most popular clustering algorithms. On the contrary to DBSCAN, here the number of clusters the data points needs to be 'clustered' into needs to be passed as an argument.

The data analysis is done based on calculating Silhouette Score for each of the clusters thus formed. For more details, Silhouette Score can provide with more information.

Overview of the generator and data

The generator simulates FitBit devices or FitBit users' data, whichever is easy to comprehend. I'll be using the term 'user' to represent a single instance of such a device for simplicity. The program has been provided with the population statistics of a region (in this case I've chose San Jose, but any other place can also be chosen.) I've listed below a few of the parameters that has been used to create it.

A few of the population statistics that have been used are:-

1. Age Distribution -- Percentage of population in different age groups. It is based on actual government published reports.
2. Gender Distribution -- Male-to-Female ratios within the population.
3. Health Parameters -- Indices like Body Mass Index, Body Fat Percentage, Height and Weight distributions etc.

A link to a detailed documentation is provided in the repository.

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Analysis

We start off first by visualising the whole set of points first.

Stage 1

There are 1455581 latitude-longitude pairs. The data points can be found in this archive under the filename user_history_2017-04-27 21:18:01.843562.csv. The files will be generated with current date-time stamp. The file generated contains 1 days worth of data for 5076 users taken at an interval of every 5 minutes. Due to the sheer number of data points an alpha = 0.01 has been used while plotting to make it more readable.

Stage 2

Only the user's final location data (current location of user) are of interest to us. The blue dots represent the latest locaiton while the red dots shows the path of the users (although it can't be figured out from this plot). At next stages we'll be dealing with only the latest location.

Stage 3

The data has been cleaned and only the latest location for all users are taken into consideration. DBSCAN has been performed on the data set to get a 'feel' of the possible 'dense' cluster locations. We see that there are about 9 dense clusters. The blue dots that are spread out in the plot are 'noisy data points'. Let's observe the data once the noise has been removed from the dataset.

Now we can clearly see the 9 dense clusters with a silhouette factor ~ 0.3. It should be noted that the 'noisy' data in this case are of importance to us as well. DBSCAN provides us with the insight of 'dense' clusters only.

Stage 4

The next plots are results of K-Means clustering taking different number of cluster points.

k = 2

k = 4

k = 6

k = 8

k = 10

k = 12

k = 14

The analysis and decision making for KMeans will be based solely on the silhouette value. We stop at number_of_clusters = 14 and take a look whether there is a significant amount of change in the silhouette value as we increase the number of clusters.

A rapid decrease in sill_coeff is observed w.r.t to number_of_clusters. From number_of_clusters = 20 it is observed that the deviation of the sill_coeff is actually quite small.

Zooming in on our previous figure, we observe that from n_cluster = 14 onwards, the sill_coeff reaches a pseudo-saturation state. Therefore, our choice of stopping KMeans at n_clusters = 14 was infact a correct one.

Report

For our current use case, based on DBSCAN, we obtained the dense cluster centers. On the contrary using K-Means all points were classified into different clusters. It should be mentioned here that DBSCAN and K-Means are used for very different purpose with different applications. As far as our dataset is concerned, in terms of clustering our 'users', the choices boils down n_cluster = 10 or n_cluster = 6, based on the silhouette score.