Decentralized classification in sensor networks via sparse representation and constrained fractional programming

This paper investigates the problem of decentralized classification algorithm in sensor networks, i.e., the data is captured by privacy sensor or the data is not suitable for publication. Therefore, we may maintain the privacy of the data captured and processed by each sensor. The number of the sensors can be selected based on actual application situations. In addition, even if some sensors break down, the classification process still works and thus the proposed scheme is robust against the traditional center scheme. The contributions of this paper are: i) two new classification algorithms are proposed based on the sparse representation and constrained fractional programming. One is for the centralized environment while the other is for the decentralized environment, where the decentralized network node is able to process its own data to extract useful information by implementing some local computation, communication, and storage operations; ii) to reduce the redundant features and noisy data of the original data is helpful to improve the speed of algorithm, we form a new classification strategy by combining the sparsity transform with the classifier; iii) to improve the robustness of the classifiers in abnormal and dangerous situations, we construct a constrained fractional programming to enforce the discriminant ability of the classifier so that the transformed coefficient vector should be closer to the class center of itself but being far away from centers of other class; iv) to handle the proposed centralized/decentralized classification problems, we decouple the constrained fraction via the Dinkelbach algorithm and alternating minimization. Finally, numerical examples are provided to verify the proposed algorithms realized in a distributed manner have the same recognition rate with the centralized algorithm.