Effective Anomaly Detection in Smart Home by Analyzing Sensor Correlations

Abstract

In a smart home environment, sensors generate events whenever activities of residents are captured. However, due to some factors, abnormal events could be generated, which are technically reasonable but contradict to real-world activities. To detect abnormal events, a number of methods has been introduced, e.g., clustering-based or snapshot-based approaches. However, they have limitations to deal with complicated anomalies which occur with large number of events and blended within normal sensor readings. In this paper, we propose a novel method of detecting sensor anomalies under smart home environment by considering spatial correlation and dependable correlation between sensors. Initially, we pre-calculate these correlations of every pair of two sensors to discover their relations. Then, from periodic sensor readings, if it has any unmatched relations to the pre-computed ones, an anomaly is detected on the correlated sensor. Through extensive evaluations with real datasets, we show that the proposed method outperforms previous approaches with 20% improvement on detection rate and reasonably low false positive rate.