Adaptive Budgeting for Collaborative Multi-Task Data Collection in Online Sparse Crowdsensing

Sparse crowdsensing collects data from a subset of the sensing area and infers data for unsensed areas, reducing data collection costs. Previous works have primarily focused on independently collecting and inferring single types of data. However, real-world scenarios often involve multiple types of data that can complement each other by providing missing spatiotemporal distribution information. In this paper, we fully consider both intra-data correlations among data of the same type and inter-data correlations among data of different types, enabling collaborative execution of various tasks. In addition, we enhance the adaptability in practical application scenarios by utilizing real-time collected sparse data to guide task execution. For this purpose, we propose a multi-task adaptive budgeting framework for online sparse crowdsensing, called MTAB-SC. This framework consists of three parts: training data updating, data inference, and data collection. First, we propose a multi-task data updating method to keep models up-to-date. Second, we design a data inference network for multi-task data joint inference. Finally, to allocate suitable budgets for each task and facilitate collaborative data collection across multiple tasks, we propose an Adaptive Budgeting for Collaborative Data Collection model (AB-CoDC). The effectiveness of our proposals is demonstrated through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets.