State-Driven Dynamic Sensor Selection and Prediction with State-Stacked Sparseness

An important problem in large-scale sensor mining is that of selecting relevant sensors for prediction purposes. Selecting small subsets of sensors, also referred to as active sensors, often leads to lower operational costs, and it reduces the noise and information overload for prediction. Existing sensor selection and prediction models either select a set of sensors a priori, or they use adaptive algorithms to determine the most relevant sensors for prediction. Sensor data sets often show dynamically varying patterns, because of which it is suboptimal to select a fixed subset of active sensors. To address this problem, we develop a novel dynamic prediction model that uses the notion of hidden system states to dynamically select a varying subset of sensors. These hidden system states are automatically learned by our model in a data-driven manner. The proposed algorithm can rapidly switch between different sets of active sensors when the model detects the (periodic or intermittent) change in the system state. We derive the dynamic sensor selection strategy by minimizing the error rates in tracking and predicting sensor readings over time. We introduce the notion of state-stacked sparseness to select a subset of the most critical sensors as a function of evolving system state. We present experimental results on two real sensor datasets, corresponding to oil drilling rig sensors and intensive care unit (ICU) sensors, and demonstrate the superiority of our approach with respect to other models.