Development and Applications of Similarity Measures for Spatial-Temporal Event and Setting Sequences

Similarity or distance measures between data objects are applied frequently in many fields or domains such as geography, environmental science, biology, economics, computer science, linguistics, logic, business analytics, and statistics, among others. One area where similarity measures are particularly important is in the analysis of spatiotemporal event sequences and associated environs or settings. This dissertation focuses on developing a framework of modeling, representation, and new similarity measure construction for sequences of spatiotemporal events and corresponding settings, which can be applied to different event data types and used in different areas of data science. The first core part of this dissertation presents a matrix-based spatiotemporal event sequence representation that unifies punctual and interval-based representation of events. This framework supports different event data types and provides support for data mining and sequence classification and clustering. The similarity measure is based on the modified Jaccard index with temporal order constraints and accommodates different event data types. This approach is demonstrated through simulated data examples and the performance of the similarity measures is evaluated with a k-nearest neighbor algorithm (k-NN) classification test on synthetic datasets. These similarity measures are incorporated into a clustering method and successfully demonstrate the usefulness in a case study analysis of event sequences extracted from space time series of a water quality monitoring system. This dissertation further proposes a new similarity measure for event setting sequences, which involve the space and time in which events occur. While similarity measures for spatiotemporal event sequences have been studied, the settings and setting sequences have not yet been considered. While modeling event setting sequences, spatial and temporal scales are considered to define the bounds of the setting and incorporate dynamic variables along with static variables. Using a matrix-based representation and an extended Jaccard index, new similarity measures are developed to allow for the use of all variable data types. With these similarity measures coupled with other multivariate statistical analysis approaches, results from a case study involving setting sequences and pollution event sequences associated with the same monitoring stations, support the hypothesis that more similar spatial-temporal settings or setting sequences may generate more similar events or event sequences. To test the scalability of STES similarity measure in a larger dataset and an extended application in different fields, this dissertation compares and contrasts the prospective space-time scan statistic with the STES similarity approach for identifying COVID-19 hotspots. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of detecting hotspots or clusters of COVID-19 to provide decision makers at various levels with better information for managing distribution of human and technical resources as the outbreak in the USA continues to grow. The prospective space-time scan statistic has been used to help identify emerging disease clusters yet results from this approach can encounter strategic limitations imposed by the spatial constraints of the scanning window. The STES-based approach adapted for this pandemic context computes the similarity of evolving normalized COVID-19 daily cases by county and clusters these to identify counties with similarly evolving COVID-19 case histories. This dissertation analyzes the spread of COVID-19 within the continental US through four periods beginning from late January 2020 using the COVID-19 datasets maintained by John Hopkins University, Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE). Results of the two approaches can complement with each other and taken together can aid in tracking the progression of the pandemic. Overall, the dissertation highlights the importance of developing similarity measures for analyzing spatiotemporal event sequences and associated settings, which can be applied to different event data types and used for data mining, sequence classification, and clustering

Survey of location-centric target tracking with mobile elements in wireless sensor networks

介绍目标跟踪的过程以及移动跟踪的特点;通过区分目标定位为主的方法和目标探测为主的方法,介绍定位为主的移动式目标跟踪方法(称为目标的移动式定位跟踪; )的研究现状;分析和比较不同方法的特点和应用领域,发现现有方法虽然可以提高跟踪质量、降低网络整体能耗,但是还存在一些问题。基于此,总结目标的移动; 式定位跟踪方法在方法类型、网络结构和节点模型等方面可能存在的研究热点,指出其研究和发展趋势。The basic process of target tracking and the properties of tracking; solutions with mobile elements were introduced. By distinguishing; location-centric methods and detection-centric methods, the current; research status of the location-centric target tracking methods were; reviewed. The properties and application fields of different solutions; were analyzed and compared. Although the existing solutions can; significantly improve tracking quality and reduce energy consumption of; the whole network, there are also some problems. Based on these; discoveries, some possible research hotspots of mobile solutions were; summarized in many aspects, such as method types, network architecture,; node model, and so on, indicating the future direction of research and; development.国家自然科学基金资助项目; 国家科技支撑计划项

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

Machine Learning in Wireless Sensor Networks: Algorithms, Strategies, and Applications

Wireless sensor networks monitor dynamic environments that change rapidly over time. This dynamic behavior is either caused by external factors or initiated by the system designers themselves. To adapt to such conditions, sensor networks often adopt machine learning techniques to eliminate the need for unnecessary redesign. Machine learning also inspires many practical solutions that maximize resource utilization and prolong the lifespan of the network. In this paper, we present an extensive literature review over the period 2002-2013 of machine learning methods that were used to address common issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The advantages and disadvantages of each proposed algorithm are evaluated against the corresponding problem. We also provide a comparative guide to aid WSN designers in developing suitable machine learning solutions for their specific application challenges.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Reputation-aware Trajectory-based Data Mining in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is a critically important technology for the acquisition of spatiotemporally dense data in diverse applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to surveillance systems. Such data helps us improve our transportation systems, monitor our air quality and the spread of diseases, respond to natural disasters, and a bevy of other applications. However, IoT sensor data is error-prone due to a number of reasons: sensors may be deployed in hazardous environments, may deplete their energy resources, have mechanical faults, or maybe become the targets of malicious attacks by adversaries. While previous research has attempted to improve the quality of the IoT data, they are limited in terms of better realization of the sensing context and resiliency against malicious attackers in real time. For instance, the data fusion techniques, which process the data in batches, cannot be applied to time-critical applications as they take a long time to respond. Furthermore, context-awareness allows us to examine the sensing environment and react to environmental changes. While previous research has considered geographical context, no related contemporary work has studied how a variety of sensor context (e.g., terrain elevation, wind speed, and user movement during sensing) can be used along with spatiotemporal relationships for online data prediction. This dissertation aims at developing online methods for data prediction by fusing spatiotemporal and contextual relationships among the participating resource-constrained mobile IoT devices (e.g. smartphones, smart watches, and fitness tracking devices). To achieve this goal, we first introduce a data prediction mechanism that considers the spatiotemporal and contextual relationship among the sensors. Second, we develop a real-time outlier detection approach stemming from a window-based sub-trajectory clustering method for finding behavioral movement similarity in terms of space, time, direction, and location semantics. We relax the prior assumption of cooperative sensors in the concluding section. Finally, we develop a reputation-aware context-based data fusion mechanism by exploiting inter sensor-category correlations. On one hand, this method is capable of defending against false data injection by differentiating malicious and honest participants based on their reported data in real time. On the other hand, this mechanism yields a lower data prediction error rate

Comparative study on machine learning algorithms for early fire forest detection system using geodata

Forest fires have caused considerable losses to ecologies, societies and economies worldwide. To minimize these losses and reduce forest fires, modeling and predicting the occurrence of forest fires are meaningful because they can support forest fire prevention and management. In recent years, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has become an important state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm, and its implementation has enriched many fields. Therefore, a competitive spatial prediction model for automatic early detection of wild forest fire using machine learning algorithms can be proposed. This model can help researchers to predict forest fires and identify risk zonas. System using machine learning algorithm on geodata will be able to notify in real time the interested parts and authorities by providing alerts and presenting on maps based on geographical treatments for more efficacity and analyzing of the situation. This research extends the application of machine learning algorithms for early fire forest prediction to detection and representation in geographical information system (GIS) maps

Multi-head CNN–RNN for multi-time series anomaly detection: An industrial case study

Detecting anomalies in time series data is becoming mainstream in a wide variety of industrial applications in which sensors monitor expensive machinery. The complexity of this task increases when multiple heterogeneous sensors provide information of di_erent nature, scales and frequencies from the same machine. Traditionally, machine learning techniques require a separate data preprocessing before training, which tends to be very time-consuming and often requires domain knowledge. Recent deep learning approaches have shown to perform well on raw time series data, eliminating the need for pre-processing. In this work, we propose a deep learning based approach for supervised multitime series anomaly detection that combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) in different ways. Unlike other approaches, we use independent CNNs, so-called convolutional heads, to deal with anomaly detection in multi-sensor systems. We address each sensor individually avoiding the need for data pre-processing and allowing for a more tailored architecture for each type of sensor. We refer to this architecture as Multi-head CNN-RNN. The proposed architecture is assessed against a real industrial case study, provided by an industrial partner, where a service elevator is monitored. Within this case study, three type of anomalies are considered: point, context-specific, and collective. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture is suitable for multi-time series anomaly detection as it obtained promising results on the real industrial scenario