Distributed Anomaly Detection Using Satellite Data Fusion

There has been a tremendous increase in the volume of Earth science data over the last decade from modern satellites, in-situ sensors and different climate models. All these datasets need to be co-analyzed to find interesting patterns or to search for extremes or outliers. Information extraction from such rich data sources using advanced data mining methodologies is a challenging task not only due to the massive volume of data, but also because these datasets ate physically stored at different geographical locations. Moving these petabytes of data over the network to a single location may waste a lot of bandwidth, and can take days to finish. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a novel algorithm which can identify outliers in the global data without moving all the data to one location. The algorithm is highly accurate (close to 99%) and requires centralizing less than 5% of the entire dataset. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm using data obtained from the NASA MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images.