A Correlation-Change Based Feature Selection Method for IoT Equipment Anomaly Detection

Selecting the right features for further data analysis is important in the process of equipment anomaly detection, especially when the origin data source involves high dimensional data with a low value density. However, existing researches failed to capture the fact that the sensor data are usually correlated (e.g., duplicated deployed sensors), and the correlations would be broken when anomalies occur with happen to the monitored equipment. In this paper, we propose to capture such sensor data correlation changes to improve the performance of IoT (Internet of Things) equipment anomaly detection. In our feature selection method, we first cluster correlated sensors together to recognize the duplicated deployed sensors according to sensor data correlations, and we monitor the data correlation changes in real time to select the sensors with correlation changes as the representative features for anomaly detection. To that end, (1) we conducted curve alignment for the sensor clustering; (2) we discuss the appropriate window size for data correlation calculation; (3) and adopted MCFS (Multi-Cluster Feature Selection) into our method to adapt to the online feature selection scenario. According to the experiment evaluation derived from real IoT equipment, we prove that our method manages to reduce the false negative of IoT equipment anomaly detection of 30% with almost the same level of false positive.