Pattern Mining from big IoT Data with fog Computing: Models, Issues, and Research Perspectives

As we are living in the era of big data, huge volumes of a wide variety of complex data-which can be of different levels of veracity-are generated or collected at a high velocity from rich sources of data in various real-life applications. A rich source of these big data sources is the Internet of Things (IoT), which include a collection of sensors, smartphones and other mobile devices, wearable devices, as well as other "things" that are capable to operate within the existing Internet infrastructure. Embedded in these big data are valuable knowledge and useful information. Hence, the research problem of data mining from big IoT data have drawn attention of many researchers as it aims to discover implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information and knowledge from the data. For instance, frequent pattern mining finds sets of frequently co-occurring items in the IoT domains. Associative classification discovers rules revealing relationships among items within the frequent patterns and their associations with the corresponding class labels. Induction based classification uses decision tree or random forest to learn from old big IoT for classifying or making predictions on new data. Over the past quarter of a century, many serial, distributed, parallel, and MapReduce-based (Hadook-based and Spark-based) big data mining algorithms have been proposed. These algorithms are run in local computers, distributed and parallel environments, clusters, grids, clouds and/or data centers. In this paper, we review some of these algorithms, discuss issues and research prospective in mining classification patterns from these big IoT data in fog. Our case study on a real-life application shows the feasibility on classifying real-life big IoT data over fog for urban analytics.