Multi-View Matrix Factorization for Sparse Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has become a new paradigm for the environment sensing. However, the sparse sensory data prevent the practical and large-scale deployment of MCS systems. Recent studies have demonstrated that the matrix factorization is an effective technique which can estimate the missing sensory data entries based on a small set of observed data entries. However, there could be multiple sensory data sets with each regarded as a different view on the environment. Applying current matrix factorization individually to each data set, the recovery performance will be low as some data sets do not have enough observed data entries thus enough information. By partitioning the parameters involved in matrix factorization, we design some novel regularizations to encode the similarities among different data sets and specific knowledge in the single data set. Based on the regularizations, we propose one basic multiview matrix factorization (MVMF) model and one neural MVMF (NMVMF) model to combine multiple sensory data sets to mutually reinforce the estimation of each single data set. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that, with the help of other data sets, our models can estimate the missing entries in the data set with a very low sampling ratio accurately while the other five baseline algorithms cannot.