Collaborative Self Organizing Map with DeepNNs for Fake Task Prevention in Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) is a sensing paradigm that has transformed the way that various service providers collect, process, and analyze data. MCS offers novel processes where data is sensed and shared through mobile devices of the users to support various applications and services for cutting-edge technologies. However, various threats, such as data poisoning, clogging task attacks and fake sensing tasks adversely affect the performance of MCS systems, especially their sensing, and computational capacities. Since fake sensing task submissions aim at the successful completion of the legitimate tasks and mobile device resources, they also drain MCS platform resources. In this work, Self Organizing Feature Map (SOFM), an artificial neural network that is trained in an unsupervised manner, is utilized to pre-cluster the legitimate data in the dataset, thus fake tasks can be detected more effectively through less imbalanced data where legitimate/fake tasks ratio is lower in the new dataset. After pre-clustered legitimate tasks are separated from the original dataset, the remaining dataset is used to train a Deep Neural Network (DeepNN) to reach the ultimate performance goal. Pre-clustered legitimate tasks are appended to the positive prediction outputs of DeepNN to boost the performance of the proposed technique, which we refer to as pre-clustered DeepNN (PrecDeepNN). The results prove that the initial average accuracy to discriminate the legitimate and fake tasks obtained from DeepNN with the selected set of features can be improved up to an average accuracy of 0.9812 obtained from the proposed machine learning technique.