Learning Semantic Association Rules from Internet of Things Data

Association rule mining (ARM) is the task of discovering commonalities in data in the form of logical implications. ARM is used in the Internet of Things (IoT) for different tasks, including monitoring and decision-making. However, existing methods give limited consideration to IoT-specific requirements such as heterogeneity and volume. Furthermore, they do not utilize important static domain-specific description data about IoT systems, which is increasingly represented as knowledge graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel ARM pipeline for IoT data that utilizes both dynamic sensor data and static IoT system metadata. Furthermore, we propose an autoencoder-based neurosymbolic ARM method (Aerial) as part of the pipeline to address the high volume of IoT data and reduce the total number of rules that are resource-intensive to process. Aerial learns a neural representation of a given dataset and extracts association rules from this representation by exploiting the reconstruction (decoding) mechanism of an autoencoder. Extensive evaluations on three IoT datasets from two domains show that ARM on both static and dynamic IoT data results in more generically applicable rules while Aerial can learn a more concise set of high-quality association rules than the state-of-the-art, with full coverage over the datasets.