Distributed Feature Selection Considering Data Pricing Based on Edge Computing in Electricity Spot Markets

With the rapid development of information technology, the multisource heterogeneous data containing meaningful information have been significantly generated by various edge devices in Internet of Energy, which is one of essential foundations of many knowledge discovery tasks based on edge computing. For some complicated tasks, essential features are owned by different data sellers offering data by blockchains. With limited budgets, buying features are crucial steps in knowledge discovery tasks in electricity spot markets, especially for learning-based algorithms. However, there are lack of proper data pricing mechanisms tailored to dynamic learning processes. Besides, existing methods cannot efficiently employ edge computing servers to obtain optimal policies for selecting features according to dynamic pricing with limited budgets. To overcome such drawbacks, a data pricing mechanism is proposed in this article, which consists of static and dynamic pricing parts. Based on this mechanism, given limited budgets, a feature selection (FS) algorithm considering multiple new factors is proposed, which offers near-optimal solutions for FS at different scenarios. Numeric results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

I. Introduction

With the rapid development of information technology, the data describing meaningful information have been significantly generated by various edge devices in Internet of Energy. Such multisourced data are often heterogeneous. Commercial requirements and financial insights in electricity spot markets can be obtained from such heterogeneous data with complicated technologies, such as data fusion or data mining, which makes data resources become essential productive factors and strategic resources in human society. Due to important financial and social value hidden in kinds of data, knowledge discovery [1], aiming to discover fundamental knowledge from a large amount of data, is a popular topic in both academic and industrial society.