An adaptive method based on contextual anomaly detection in Internet of Things through wireless sensor networks

With the widespread propagation of Internet of Things through wireless sensor networks, massive amounts of sensor data are being generated at an unprecedented rate, resulting in very large quantities of explicit or implicit information. When analyzing such sensor data, it is of particular importance to detect accurately and efficiently not only individual anomalous behaviors but also anomalous events (i.e. patterns of behaviors). However, most previous work has focused only on detecting anomalies while generally ignoring the correlations between them. Even in approaches that take into account correlations between anomalies, most disregard the fact that the anomaly status of sensor data changes over time. In this article, we propose an unsupervised contextual anomaly detection method in Internet of Things through wireless sensor networks. This method accounts for both a dynamic anomaly status and correlations between anomalies based contextually on their spatial and temporal neighbors. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in an anomaly detection model. The experimental results show that this method can accurately and efficiently detect not only individual anomalies but also anomalous events.