Although wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used, the existence of data loss and corruption caused by poor network conditions, sensor bandwidth, and node failure during transmission greatly affects the credibility of monitoring data. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a weighted robust principal component analysis method to recover the corrupted and missing data in WSNs. By decomposing the original data into a low-rank normal data matrix and a sparse abnormal matrix, the proposed method can identify the abnormal data and avoid the influence of corruption on the reconstruction of normal data. In addition, the low-rankness is constrained by weighted nuclear norm minimization instead of the nuclear norm minimization to preserve the major data components and ensure credible reconstruction data. An alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm is further developed to solve the resultant optimization problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of recovery accuracy in real WSNs.
Keywords: missing and corrupted data recovery; robust principal component analysis; weighted nuclear norm; wireless sensor networks.