Unsupervised Distributed Anomaly Detection Framework for IoT in Edge AI Network
Xingguo Jiang, Chang Lu, Hong Luo, Yan Sun · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
Anomaly detection of sensor data is crucial to ensure the stability and effectiveness of Internet of Things (IoT) system. The task requires high accuracy and low latency, which makes distributed anomaly detection gradually become a research hotspot. Edge AI networks further enhance the computing power of edge servers, allowing distributed anomaly detection to be gradually applied to complex scenarios under the Industrial IoT (IIoT), such as smart factories. However, in such cases, the data reported by different sensors in different fields are not independent and identically distributed (non-IID). Simultaneously, during unsupervised training, anomaly data mixed into the training data will reduce the recognition ability of the anomaly detector. To address these challenges, we propose an unsupervised distributed anomaly detection framework. On the cloud, we train an unsupervised anomaly detection model with global factors, using global and local factors to learn the distribution patterns of different fields. At the edge, a multidimensional threshold and its automatic selection algorithm are proposed to overcome the problem of decreased anomaly recognition ability introduced by anomaly training data. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods in F1-score, can detect anomalies with high accuracy and efficiency in distributed IoT scenarios.