On the Use of Interpretable Machine Learning for the Management of Data Quality

TL;DR

This paper proposes using interpretable machine learning to identify significant features in IoT data, enhancing data quality management at the edge by enabling feature selection and dimensionality reduction.

Contribution

It introduces an ensemble-based interpretable machine learning approach for feature importance detection to improve data quality in IoT and edge computing environments.

Findings

Effective feature selection for IoT data quality management.

Enhanced dimensionality reduction with interpretability.

Robust performance across various simulated scenarios.

Abstract

Data quality is a significant issue for any application that requests for analytics to support decision making. It becomes very important when we focus on Internet of Things (IoT) where numerous devices can interact to exchange and process data. IoT devices are connected to Edge Computing (EC) nodes to report the collected data, thus, we have to secure data quality not only at the IoT but also at the edge of the network. In this paper, we focus on the specific problem and propose the use of interpretable machine learning to deliver the features that are important to be based for any data processing activity. Our aim is to secure data quality, at least, for those features that are detected as significant in the collected datasets. We have to notice that the selected features depict the highest correlation with the remaining in every dataset, thus, they can be adopted for dimensionality reduction. We focus on multiple methodologies for having interpretability in our learning models and adopt an ensemble scheme for the final decision. Our scheme is capable of timely retrieving the final result and efficiently select the appropriate features. We evaluate our model through extensive simulations and present numerical results. Our aim is to reveal its performance under various experimental scenarios that we create varying a set of parameters adopted in our mechanism.