High rate outlier detection in wireless sensor networks: a comparative study

The rapid development of Smart Cities and the Internet of Thinks (IoT) is largely dependent on data obtained through Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The quality of data gathered from sensor nodes is influenced by abnormalities that happen due to different reasons including, malicious attacks, sensor malfunction or noise related to communication channel. Accordingly, outlier detection is an essential procedure to ensure the quality of data derived from WSNs. In the modern utilizations of WSNs, especially in online applications, the high detection rate for abnormal data is closely correlated with the time required to detect these data. This work presents an investigation of different outlier detection techniques and compares their performance in terms of accuracy, true positive rate, false positive rate, and the required detection time. The investigated algorithms include Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Deferential Evolution (DE), One Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM), K-means clustering, combination of Contourlet Transform and OCSVM (CT-OCSVM), and combination of Discrete Wavelet Transform and OCSVM (DWT-OCSVM). Real datasets gathered from a WSN configured in a local lab are used for testing the techniques. Different types and values of outliers have been imposed in these datasets to accommodate the comparison requirements. The results show that there are some differences in the accuracy, detection rate, and false positive rate of the outlier detections, except K-means clustering which failed to detect outlier in some cases. The required detection time for both PSO and DE is very long as compared with the other techniques meanwhile, the CT-OCSVM and DWT-OCSVM required short time and also they can achieve high performance. On the other hand CT and DWT technique has the ability to compress its used dataset where in this paper, CT can extract much less number of coefficients as compared DWT. This makes CT-OCSVM more efficient to be utilized in detecting outliers in WSNS.