Methods and systems of assigning estimated positions and attributes to wireless access points in a positioning system

In one embodiment, a technique is provided for detecting that a wireless beacon is pathological. Data points captured by mobile devices or specialized scanning devices are received at software executing on an electronic device, each data point containing information about beacon attributes. A set of disjoint regions are defined in one or more dimensions and each data point is associated with a corresponding region based on at least one element of the information of the data point lying within the boundaries of the corresponding region. An aggregate attribute is determined for each region based on the information of data points associated with the corresponding region. Then the aggregate attribute of one or more regions is used to determined whether the wireless beacon is pathological, and if determined to be pathological, the wireless beacon is excluded from use by a beacon-based positioning system.