With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoTs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and related techniques, the amount of sensory data manifests an explosive growth. In some applications of IoTs and WSNs, the size of sensory data has already exceeded several petabytes annually, which brings too many troubles and challenges for the data collection, which is a primary operation in IoTs and WSNs. Since the exact data collection is not affordable for many WSN and IoT systems due to the

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... tations on bandwidth and energy, many approximate data collection algorithms have been proposed in the last decade. This survey reviews the state of the art of approximate data collection algorithms. We classify them into three categories: the model-based ones, the compressive sensing based ones, and the query-driven ones. For each category of algorithms, the advantages and disadvantages are elaborated, some challenges and unsolved problems are pointed out, and the research prospects are forecasted.