PCA-Driven Adaptive Sensor Triage for Edge AI Inference

ArXi:2604.05045v1 Announce Type: cross Multi-channel sensor networks in industrial IoT often exceed available bandwidth. We propose PCA-Triage, a streaming algorithm that converts incremental PCA loadings into proportional per-channel sampling rates under a bandwidth budget. PCA-Triage runs in O(wdk) time with zero trainable parameters (0.67 ms per decision). We evaluate on 7 benchmarks (8--82 channels) against 9 baselines. PCA-Triage is the best unsupervised method on 3 of 6 datasets at 50% bandwidth, winning 5 of 6 against every baseline with large effect sizes (r = 0.71--0.91.