Region-Aware Bagging and Deep Learning-Based Fake Task Detection in Mobile Crowdsensing Platforms

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a distributed sensing concept that enables ubiquitous sensing services via various builtin sensors in smart devices. However, MCS systems are vulnerable because of being non-dedicated. Especially, submission of fake tasks with the aim of clogging participants device resources as well as MCS servers is a crucial threat to MCS platforms. In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning-based solution for MCS platforms to mitigate illegitimate tasks. Furthermore, we also integrate k-means-based classification with the proposed method to extract region-specific features as input to the machine learningbased fake task detection. Through simulations, we compare the ensemble method to a previously proposed Deep Belief Network (DBN)-based fake task detection, which is also shown to improve performance in terms of accuracy, F1 score, recall, precision and geometric mean score (G-mean) with the integration of regionawareness. Our validation results show that the ensemble machine learning-based detection can eliminate majority of the fake tasks, with up to 0.995 precision, 0.997 recall, 0.996 F1, 0.993 accuracy and 0.982 G-Mean. Furthermore, the proposed solution introduces savings up to 12.18% battery of mobile devices while reducing the impacted recruits to 0.25% and protecting up to 10.59% participants against malicious sensing tasks.