EXPERIENCE: Algorithms and Case Study for Explaining Repairs with Uniform Profiles over IoT Data

Abstract

IoT data with timestamps are often found with outliers, such as GPS trajectories or sensor readings. While existing systems mostly focus on detecting temporal outliers without explanations and repairs, a decision maker may be more interested in the cause of the outlier appearance such that subsequent actions would be taken, e.g., cleaning unreliable readings or repairing broken devices or adopting a strategy for data repairs. Such outlier detection, explanation, and repairs are expected to be performed in either offline (batch) or online modes (over streaming IoT data with timestamps). In this work, we present TsClean, a new prototype system for detecting and repairing outliers with explanations over IoT data. The framework defines uniform profiles to explain the outliers detected by various algorithms, including the outliers with variant time intervals, and take approaches to repair outliers. Both batch and streaming processing are supported in a uniform framework. In particular, by varying the block size, it provides a tradeoff between computing the accurate results and approximating with efficient incremental computation. In this article, we present several case studies of applying TsClean in industry, e.g., how this framework works in detecting and repairing outliers over excavator water temperature data, and how to get reasonable explanations and repairs for the detected outliers in tracking excavators.