The quality and reliability of internet of thing (IoT) ecosystems heavily rely on accurate and dependable sensor data. However, resource limited sensors are prone to failure due to various factors like environmental disturbances and electrical noise in which they can produce erroneous and faulty measurements. These can have significant consequences across different domains, including a threat to safety in critical systems. Though many researches have been conducted, the existing literature primarily focuses on fault detection in the sensor data, while fault detection is useful, it is still a reactive approach that identifies the faults after they have occurred, meaning that actions are taken after the fault has already impacted the system, potentially leading to negative consequences. In this study, a proactive approach has been proposed by developing a two-stage solution. In the first stage, a hybrid convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM) model was trained to forecast sensor measurements based on historical data, while in the second stage, the forecasted measurements were passed to a hybrid convolutional neural network-multi layer perceptron (CNN-MLP) model that has been trained to recognize different types of sensor faults and classify the new measurements accordingly. By passing the forecasted sensor values as input to the classification model and categorizing them as normal, bias, drift, random or poly-drift, anticipated the potential faults before they manifest. The publicly available Intel Lab data raw dataset is used, which has been annotated and fault-injected. For regression, gated recurrent unit (GRU), Long short term memory (LSTM), bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM), convolutional neural network-gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU), convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM), and convolutional neural network-bidirectional long short term memory (CNN-BiLSTM), were evaluated and compared their performance using root mean squared error (RMSE), mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) with 2-split time series cross-validation. CNN-LSTM outperformed the other models with a Mean Absolute Error of 2.0957 for a 45 time steps forecast. For the classification task, convolutional neural network (CNN), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and convolutional neural network-multi layer perceptron (CNN-MLP) evaluated using the metrics accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score with 5 and tenfold cross-validations. CNN-MLP outperformed the others with accuracy of 96.11% for bias, 99.33% for drift, and 98.61% for random and 98.81% for poly-drift. The average accuracy across the 4 faults is 98.21%, which is a 0.3% increase from the baseline work 97.91%. By adopting a proactive approach to sensor fault prediction and classification, this research aims to enhance the reliability and efficiency of IoT systems, allowing for preventive measures to be taken before faults have a detrimental impact.
