Sensor selection on graphs via data-driven node sub-sampling in network time series

Abstract: This paper is concerned by the problem of selecting an optimal sampling set of sensors over a network of time series for the purpose of signal recovery at non-observed sensors with a minimal reconstruction error. The problem is motivated by applications where time-dependent graph signals are collected over redundant networks. In this setting, one may wish to only use a subset of sensors to predict data streams over the whole collection of nodes in the underlying graph. A typical application is the possibility to reduce the power consumption in a network of sensors that may have limited battery supplies. We propose and compare various data-driven strategies to turn off a fixed number of sensors or equivalently to select a sampling set of nodes. We also relate our approach to the existing literature on sensor selection from multivariate data with a (possibly) underlying graph structure. Our methodology combines tools from multivariate time series analysis, graph signal processing, statistical learning in high-dimension and deep learning. To illustrate the performances of our approach, we report numerical experiments on the analysis of real data from bike sharing networks in different cities.