Distance Based Method for Outlier Detection of Body Sensor Networks

We propose a distance based method for the outlier detection of body sensor networks. Firstly, we use a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to calculate the probability of the distance to k nearest neighbors for diagnosed data. If the probability is less than a threshold, and the distance of this data to its left and right neighbors is greater than a pre-defined value, the diagnosed data is decided as an outlier. Further, we formalize a sliding window based method to improve the outlier detection performance. Finally, to estimate the KDE by training sensor readings with errors, we introduce a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based method to estimate the most probable ground truth values which have the maximum probability to produce the training data. Simulation results show that the proposed method possesses a good detection accuracy with a low false alarm rate. Received on 19 September 2015; accepted on 24 November 2015; published on 19 January 2016