Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS), through employing considerable workers to sense
and collect data in a participatory manner, has been recognized as a promising
paradigm for building many large-scale applications in a cost-effective way,
such as combating COVID-19. The recruitment of trustworthy and high-quality
workers is an important research issue for MCS. Previous studies assume that
the qualities of workers are known in advance, or the platform knows the
qualities of workers once it receives their collected data. In reality, to
reduce their costs and thus maximize revenue, many strategic workers do not
perform their sensing tasks honestly and report fake data to the platform. So,
it is very hard for the platform to evaluate the authenticity of the received
data. In this paper, an incentive mechanism named Semi-supervision based
Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit reverse Auction (SCMABA) is proposed to solve
the recruitment problem of multiple unknown and strategic workers in MCS.
First, we model the worker recruitment as a multi-armed bandit reverse auction
problem, and design an UCB-based algorithm to separate the exploration and
exploitation, considering the Sensing Rates (SRs) of recruited workers as the
gain of the bandit. Next, a Semi-supervised Sensing Rate Learning (SSRL)
approach is proposed to quickly and accurately obtain the workers' SRs, which
consists of two phases, supervision and self-supervision. Last, SCMABA is
designed organically combining the SRs acquisition mechanism with multi-armed
bandit reverse auction, where supervised SR learning is used in the
exploration, and the self-supervised one is used in the exploitation. We prove
that our SCMABA achieves truthfulness and individual rationality. Additionally,
we exhibit outstanding performances of the SCMABA mechanism through in-depth
simulations of real-world data traces.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figure