Transfer Learning Assisted Detection of Anomalous Events With Insufficient Primary Attribute Data Samples in MEC Networks
Jine Tang, Xiaotong Ma, Song Yang, Yong Xiang, Zhangbing Zhou · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
Nowadays IoT devices in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) networks have been deployed in large-scale quantities to guarantee sensing data collection for anomalous event detection as full as possible even if some devices are in fault. Some techniques, such as clustering and dimensionality reduction, are adopted to eliminate redundant sensing data collection in this large-scale deployment. However, they not only have high computational complexity and easily cause the loss of information on the primary sensing attributes for detection, but also bring certain errors to the detection because of their low sensitivity to data processed. In addition, insufficient collection of primary attribute data samples often results from physical or human factors, and blind imputation of large-scale data gaps without basis may lead to greater irreparable losses. To address the above challenges, we first complete the selection of optimal primary attribute device collection and aggregation (PADCA) path based on minimum spanning tree, reducing data communication cost for redundant primary attributes collection. Then, we propose an anomalous impact correlation search strategy to quickly locate all MEC servers whose management regions have cascading anomalous event and help determine the transferable source MEC servers. Leveraging this, we use transfer learning to help detect anomalous events in the management regions of the MEC servers with insufficient primary attribute data samples, where a particle swarm optimization based back-propagation (PSO-BP) neural network model is used to infer the fusion weight of each primary attribute. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher detection performance in terms of detection time, energy consumption, accuracy, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve compared to the benchmarks by at least 24%, 34%, 0.5 and 0.05.