Few-Shot Data Completion for New Tasks in Sparse Crowdsensing

Mobile Crowdsensing is a type of technology that utilizes mobile devices and volunteers to gather data about specific topics at large scales in real-time. However, in practice, limited participation leads to missing data, i.e., the collected data may be sparse, which makes it difficult to perform accurate analysis. A possible technique called sparse crowdsensing incorporates the sparse case with data completion, where unsensed data could be estimated through inference. However, sparse crowdsensing typically suffers from poor performance during the data completion stage due to various challenges: the sparsity of the sensed data, reliance on numerous timeslots, and uncertain spatiotemporal connections. To resolve such few-shot issues, the proposed solution uses the Correlated Data Fusion for Matrix Completion (CDFMC) approach, which leverages a small amount of objective data to retrain an auxiliary dataset-based pre-trained model that can estimate unsensed data efficiently. CDFMC is trained using a combination of the traditional Deep Matrix Factorization and the Kalman Filtering, which not only enables the efficient representation and comparison of data samples but also fuses the objective data and auxiliary data effectively. Evaluation results show that the proposed CDFMC outperforms baseline techniques, achieving high accuracy in completing unsensed data with minimal training data.