Incremental elliptical boundary estimation for anomaly detection in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a low cost option for gathering spatially dense data from different environments. However, WSNs have limited energy resources that hinder the dissemination of the raw data over the network to a central location. This has stimulated research into efficient data mining approaches, which can exploit the restricted computational capabilities of the sensors to model their normal behavior. Having a normal model of the network, sensors can then forward anomalous measurements to the base station. Most of the current data modeling approaches proposed for WSNs require a fixed offline training period and use batch training in contrast to the real streaming nature of data in these networks. In addition they usually work in stationary environments. In this paper we present an efficient online model construction algorithm that captures the normal behavior of the system. Our model is capable of tracking changes in the data distribution in the monitored environment. We illustrate the proposed algorithm with numerical results on both real-life and simulated data sets, which demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our approach compared to existing methods.