Learning from the past: Intelligent on-line weather monitoring based on matrix completion

Matrix completion has emerged very recently and provides a new venue for low cost data gathering in WSNs. Existing schemes often assume that the data matrix has a known and fixed low-rank, which is unlikely to hold in a practical monitoring system such as weather data gathering. Weather data varies in temporal and spatial domain with time. By analyzing a large set of weather data collected from 196 sensors in ZhuZhou, China, we reveal that weather data have the features of low-rank, temporal stability, and relative rank stability. Taking advantage of these features, we propose an on-line data gathering scheme based on matrix completion theory, named MC-Weather, to adaptively sample different locations according to environmental and weather conditions. To better schedule sampling process while satisfying the required reconstruction accuracy, we propose several novel techniques, including three sample learning principles, an adaptive sampling algorithm based on matrix completion, and a uniform time slot and cross sample model. With these techniques, our MC-Weather scheme can collect the sensory data at required accuracy while largely reduce the cost for sensing, communication and computation. We perform extensive simulations based on the real weather data sets and the simulation results validate the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed scheme.