The current situation with malware naming conventions is in disarray. Different antivirus vendors use different naming conventions and sometimes they don't follow their own standards. Let's look at a few results for a random virus. These are the results from VirusTotal, a meta-antivirus scanning service. We can see that it is a Trojan malware with some vendors (Dr.Web and TrendMicro) setting the family as StartPage, some saying it's in the Agent family, some saying it is in the FakeAV family and some saying it is Generic "KR" malware.

We show how to estimate a model's test error from unlabeled data, on distributions very different from the training distribution, while assuming only that certain conditional independencies are preserved between train and test. We do not need to assume that the optimal predictor is the same between train and test, or that the true distribution lies in any parametric family. We can also efficiently differentiate the error estimate to perform unsupervised discriminative learning. Our technical tool is the method of moments, which allows us to exploit conditional independencies in the absence of a fully-specified model. Our framework encompasses a large family of losses including the log and exponential loss, and extends to structured output settings such as hidden Markov models.

We consider the problem of change-point detection in multivariate time-series. The multivariate distribution of the observations is supposed to follow a graphical model, whose graph and parameters are affected by abrupt changes throughout time. We demonstrate that it is possible to perform exact Bayesian inference whenever one considers a simple class of undirected graphs called spanning trees as possible structures. We are then able to integrate on the graph and segmentation spaces at the same time by combining classical dynamic programming with algebraic results pertaining to spanning trees. In particular, we show that quantities such as posterior distributions for change-points or posterior edge probabilities over time can efficiently be obtained. We illustrate our results on both synthetic and experimental data arising from biology and neuroscience.

The task of dialog management is commonly decomposed into two sequential subtasks: dialog state tracking and dialog policy learning. In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate the true dialog state from noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. The state tracking task is primarily meant to support a dialog policy. From a probabilistic perspective, this is achieved by maintaining a posterior distribution over hidden dialog states composed of a set of context dependent variables. Once a dialog policy is learned, it strives to select an optimal dialog act given the estimated dialog state and a defined reward function. This paper introduces a novel method of dialog state tracking based on a bilinear algebric decomposition model that provides an efficient inference schema through collective matrix factorization. We evaluate the proposed approach on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset and we show that the proposed tracker gives encouraging results compared to the state-of-the-art trackers that participated in this standard benchmark. Finally, we show that the prediction schema is computationally efficient in comparison to the previous approaches.

The difficulty of multi-class classification generally increases with the number of classes. Using data from a subset of the classes, can we predict how well a classifier will scale with an increased number of classes? Under the assumption that the classes are sampled exchangeably, and under the assumption that the classifier is generative (e.g. QDA or Naive Bayes), we show that the expected accuracy when the classifier is trained on $k$ classes is the $k-1$st moment of a \emph{conditional accuracy distribution}, which can be estimated from data. This provides the theoretical foundation for performance extrapolation based on pseudolikelihood, unbiased estimation, and high-dimensional asymptotics. We investigate the robustness of our methods to non-generative classifiers in simulations and one optical character recognition example.

We consider interactive algorithms in the pool-based setting, and in the stream-based setting. Interactive algorithms observe suggested elements (representing actions or queries), and interactively select some of them and receive responses. Pool-based algorithms can select elements at any order, while stream-based algorithms observe elements in sequence, and can only select elements immediately after observing them. We assume that the suggested elements are generated independently from some source distribution, and ask what is the stream size required for emulating a pool algorithm with a given pool size. We provide algorithms and matching lower bounds for general pool algorithms, and for utility-based pool algorithms. We further show that a maximal gap between the two settings exists also in the special case of active learning for binary classification.

This paper considers global optimization with a black-box unknown objective function that can be non-convex and non-differentiable. Such a difficult optimization problem arises in many real-world applications, such as parameter tuning in machine learning, engineering design problem, and planning with a complex physics simulator. This paper proposes a new global optimization algorithm, called Locally Oriented Global Optimization (LOGO), to aim for both fast convergence in practice and finite-time error bound in theory. The advantage and usage of the new algorithm are illustrated via theoretical analysis and an experiment conducted with 11 benchmark test functions. Further, we modify the LOGO algorithm to specifically solve a planning problem via policy search with continuous state/action space and long time horizon while maintaining its finite-time error bound. We apply the proposed planning method to accident management of a nuclear power plant. The result of the application study demonstrates the practical utility of our method.

The collection and analysis of user data drives improvements in the app and web ecosystems, but comes with risks to privacy. This paper examines discrete distribution estimation under local privacy, a setting wherein service providers can learn the distribution of a categorical statistic of interest without collecting the underlying data. We present new mechanisms, including hashed K-ary Randomized Response (KRR), that empirically meet or exceed the utility of existing mechanisms at all privacy levels. New theoretical results demonstrate the order-optimality of KRR and the existing RAPPOR mechanism at different privacy regimes.

In this paper, we attack the anomaly detection problem by directly modeling the data distribution with deep architectures. We propose deep structured energy based models (DSEBMs), where the energy function is the output of a deterministic deep neural network with structure. We develop novel model architectures to integrate EBMs with different types of data such as static data, sequential data, and spatial data, and apply appropriate model architectures to adapt to the data structure. Our training algorithm is built upon the recent development of score matching \cite{sm}, which connects an EBM with a regularized autoencoder, eliminating the need for complicated sampling method. Statistically sound decision criterion can be derived for anomaly detection purpose from the perspective of the energy landscape of the data distribution. We investigate two decision criteria for performing anomaly detection: the energy score and the reconstruction error. Extensive empirical studies on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our proposed model consistently matches or outperforms all the competing methods.

This book explores an extensive range of machine learning techniques uncovering hidden tricks and tips for several types of data using practical and real-world examples. While machine learning can be highly theoretical, this book offers a refreshing hands-on approach without losing sight of the underlying principles. Inside, a full exploration of the various algorithms gives you high-quality guidance so you can begin to see just how effective machine learning is at tackling contemporary challenges of big data. This is the only book you need to implement a whole suite of open source tools, frameworks, and languages in machine learning. We will cover the leading data science languages, Python and R, and the underrated but powerful Julia, as well as a range of other big data platforms including Spark, Hadoop, and Mahout.