Data Quality Audit and Bivariate Temperature-Humidity Analysis of a Long-Term LoRaWAN Network: Anomaly Detection, PCA, Clustering and Machine Learning

Abstract

Long-term environmental IoT/LPWAN deployments often aggregate heterogeneous data streams from diverse devices without systematic auditing of each variable's actual coverage prior to analysis-an increased risk when multiple sensor types coexist within the same network. This work proposes a C++17 processing pipeline applied to the Tour Perret LoRaWAN dataset (421 937 frames, June 2021--June 2023, 5 devices). A systematic coverage audit integrated into the extraction phase reveals that CO2 is completely missing (0% coverage) and pressure is reported only by an isolated base module (Wyres, 4.24% of the corpus), invalidating the initial hypothesis of a joint four-variable analysis. The analysis is refocused on the Temperature--Humidity pair, jointly available across 205{,}005 frames (95.76%) from 4 Elsys EMS sensors. The pipeline sequentially performs anomaly detection (modified Z-score, Isolation Forest), bivariate Principal Component Analysis, clustering (K-means, DBSCAN), and a multilayer perceptron predicting humidity from temperature and time, whose residuals serve as a detector for slow drift. On real-world data: Temperature--Humidity correlation r=-0.662, two-component PCA (PC1 =83.1% of variance), Isolation Forest detects 2.12% multivariate anomalies while univariate Z-score detects none, calibrated DBSCAN isolates 0.17% noise across 13 clusters, and the MLP achieves $R^2=0.672$ (RMSE =10.54%) in cross-validation. This work demonstrates that per-variable coverage auditing prior to modeling is a necessary methodological step for heterogeneous multi-sensor IoT datasets.