Cost-conscious cleaning of massive RFID data sets

Efficient and accurate data cleaning is an essential task for the successful deployment of RFID systems. Although important advances have been made in tag detection rates, it is still common to see a large number of lost readings due to radio frequency (RF) interference and tag-reader configurations. Existing cleaning techniques have focused on the development of accurate methods that work well under a wide set of conditions, but have disregarded the very high cost of cleaning in a real application that may have thousands of readers and millions of tags. In this paper, we propose a cleaning framework that takes an RFID data set and a collection of cleaning methods, with associated costs, and induces a cleaning plan that optimizes the overall accuracy-adjusted cleaning costs by determining the conditions under which inexpensive methods are appropriate, and those under which more expensive methods are absolutely necessary.