On sensor data verification for participatory sensing systems

In this paper we study the problem of sensor data verification in Participatory Sensing (PS) systems using an air quality/pollution monitoring application as a validation example. Data verification, in the context of PS, consists of the process of detecting and removing spatial outliers to properly reconstruct the variables of interest. We propose, implement, and test a hybrid neighborhood-aware algorithm for outlier detection that considers the uneven spatial density of the users, the number of malicious users, the level of conspiracy, and the lack of accuracy and malfunctioning sensors. The algorithm utilizes the Delaunay triangulation and Gaussian Mixture Models to build neighborhoods based on the spatial and non-spatial attributes of each location. This neighborhood definition allows us to demonstrate that it is not necessary to apply accurate but computationally expensive estimators to the entire dataset to obtain good results, as equally accurate but computationally cheaper methods can also be applied to part of the data and obtain good results as well. Our experimental results show that our hybrid algorithm performs as good as the best estimator while reducing the execution time considerably.