Selecting most informative contributors with unknown costs for budgeted crowdsensing

Abstract

Mobile crowdsensing has become a novel and promising paradigm in collecting environmental data. A critical problem in improving the QoS of crowdsensing is to decide which users to select to perform sensing tasks, in order to obtain the most informative data, while maintaining the total sensing costs below a given budget. The key challenges lie in (i) finding an effective measure of the informativeness of users' data, (ii) learning users' sensing costs which are unknown a priori, and (iii) designing efficient user selection algorithms that achieve low-regret guarantees. In this paper, we build Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model spatial locations, and provide a mutual information-based criteria to characterize users' informativeness. To tackle the second and third challenges, we model the problem as a budgeted multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem based on stochastic assumptions, and propose an algorithm with theoretically proven low-regret guarantee. Our theoretical analysis and evaluation results both demonstrate that our algorithm can efficiently select most informative users under stringent constraints.