Hypergraph-based Truth Discovery for Sparse Data in Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing leverages the power of a vast group of participants to collect sensory data, thus presenting an economical solution for data collection. However, due to the variability among participants, the quality of sensory data varies significantly, making it crucial to extract truthful information from sensory data of differing quality. Additionally, given the fixed time and monetary costs for the participants, they typically only perform a subset of tasks. As a result, the datasets collected in real-world scenarios are usually sparse. Current truth discovery methods struggle to adapt to datasets with varying sparsity, especially when dealing with sparse datasets. In this article, we propose an adaptive Hypergraph-based EM truth discovery method, HGEM. The HGEM algorithm leverages the topological characteristics of hypergraphs to model sparse datasets, thereby improving its performance in evaluating the reliability of participants and the true value of the event to be observed. Experiments based on simulated and real-world scenarios demonstrate that HGEM consistently achieves higher predictive accuracy.