Bayesian Spatial Field Reconstruction with Unknown Distortions in Sensor Networks

Abstract

Spatial regression of random fields based on potentially biased sensing information is proposed in this paper. One major concern in such applications is that since it is not known a-priori what the accuracy of the collected data from each sensor is, the performance can be negatively affected if the collected information is not fused appropriately. For example, the data collector may measure the phenomenon inappropriately, or alternatively, the sensors could be out of calibration, thus introducing random gain and bias to the measurement process. Such readings would be systematically distorted, leading to incorrect estimation of the spatial field. To combat this detrimental effect, we develop a robust version of the spatial field model based on a mixture of Gaussian process experts. We then develop two different approaches for Bayesian spatial field reconstruction: the first algorithm is the Spatial Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (S-BLUE), in which one considers the quadratic loss function and restricts the estimator to the linear family of transformations; the second algorithm is based on empirical Bayes, which utilizes a two-stage estimation procedure to produce accurate predictive inference in the presence of “misbehaving” sensors. In addition, we develop the distributed version of these two approaches to drastically improve the computational efficiency in large-scale settings. We present extensive simulation results using both synthetic datasets and semi-synthetic datasets with real temperature measurements and simulated distortions to draw useful conclusions regarding the performance of each of the algorithms.