Fraud is a billion-dollar business and expands rapidly year by year. Thousands of people fall victim to it. Fraud always includes a false statement, misinterpretation, or deceitful conduct. Common varieties of fraud offenses include identity theft, insurance fraud, credit/debit card fraud, and mail fraud. The PwC global economic crime survey of 2018 (PwC, 2018) found that about half of the 7,200 surveyed enterprises had already experienced fraud of some kind. This is an increase compared to the PwC survey conducted in 2016 (PwC, 2016), in which slightly more than a third of organizations surveyed had experienced economic crime.

A new study has found that the masks which protect people from spreading the coronavirus also have a second use, breaking facial recognition algorithms. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology have found that the best facial recognition algorithms had significantly higher error rates when trying to identify someone wearing a cloth covering. The researchers tested one-to-one matching algorithms, where a photo is compared to a different photo of the same person. This verification method is commonly used to unlock smartphones, or check passports. It drew digital masks onto the faces in a trove of border crossing photographs, and then compared those photos against another database of unmasked people seeking visas and other immigration benefits.

Feature selection is a data mining task with the potential of speeding up classification algorithms, enhancing model comprehensibility, and improving learning accuracy. However, finding a subset of features that is optimal in terms of predictive accuracy is usually computationally intractable. Out of several heuristic approaches to dealing with this problem, the Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) algorithm has received considerable interest from data mining practitioners. In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms inspired by RFE, called Fibonacci- and k-Subsecting Recursive Feature Elimination, which remove features in logarithmic steps, probing the wrapped classifier more densely for the more promising feature subsets. The proposed algorithms are experimentally compared against RFE on 28 highly multidimensional datasets and evaluated in a practical case study involving 3D electron density maps from the Protein Data Bank. The results show that Fibonacci and k-Subsecting Recursive Feature Elimination are capable of selecting a smaller subset of features much faster than standard RFE, while achieving comparable predictive performance.

The goal of this work is to build a classifier that can identify text complexity within the context of teaching reading to English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. To present language learners with texts that are suitable to their level of English, a set of features that can describe the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, discursive, and psychological complexity of a given text were identified. Using a corpus of 6171 texts, which had already been classified into three different levels of difficulty by ESL experts, different experiments were conducted with five machine learning algorithms. The results showed that the adopted linguistic features provide a good overall classification performance (F-Score = 0.97). A scalability evaluation was conducted to test if such a classifier could be used within real applications, where it can be, for example, plugged into a search engine or a web-scraping module. In this evaluation, the texts in the test set are not only different from those from the training set but also of different types (ESL texts vs. children reading texts). Although the overall performance of the classifier decreased significantly (F-Score = 0.65), the confusion matrix shows that most of the classification errors are between the classes two and three (the middle-level classes) and that the system has a robust performance in categorizing texts of class one and four. This behavior can be explained by the difference in classification criteria between the two corpora. Hence, the observed results confirm the usability of such a classifier within a real-world application.

Credit card fraud is an ongoing problem for almost all industries in the world, and it raises millions of dollars to the global economy each year. Therefore, there is a number of research either completed or proceeding in order to detect these kinds of frauds in the industry. These researches generally use rule-based or novel artificial intelligence approaches to find eligible solutions. The ultimate goal of this paper is to summarize state-of-the-art approaches to fraud detection using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. While summarizing, we will categorize the common problems such as imbalanced dataset, real time working scenarios, and feature engineering challenges that almost all research works encounter, and identify general approaches to solve them. The imbalanced dataset problem occurs because the number of legitimate transactions is much higher than the fraudulent ones whereas applying the right feature engineering is substantial as the features obtained from the industries are limited, and applying feature engineering methods and reforming the dataset is crucial. Also, adapting the detection system to real time scenarios is a challenge since the number of credit card transactions in a limited time period is very high. In addition, we will discuss how evaluation metrics and machine learning methods differentiate among each research. NTRODUCTION The number of cashless transactions is at its peak point since the beginning of the digital era and it is most likely to increase in the future.

Understanding how certain brain regions relate to a specific neurological disorder has been an important area of neuroimaging research. A promising approach to identify the salient regions is using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can be used to analyze graph structured data, e.g. brain networks constructed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We propose an interpretable GNN framework with a novel salient region selection mechanism to determine neurological brain biomarkers associated with disorders. Specifically, we design novel regularized pooling layers that highlight salient regions of interests (ROIs) so that we can infer which ROIs are important to identify a certain disease based on the node pooling scores calculated by the pooling layers. Our proposed framework, Pooling Regularized-GNN (PR-GNN), encourages reasonable ROI-selection and provides flexibility to preserve either individual- or group-level patterns. We apply the PR-GNN framework on a Biopoint Autism Spectral Disorder (ASD) fMRI dataset. We investigate different choices of the hyperparameters and show that PR-GNN outperforms baseline methods in terms of classification accuracy. The salient ROI detection results show high correspondence with the previous neuroimaging-derived biomarkers for ASD.

In a report published today by the National Institutes of Science and Technology (NIST), a physical sciences laboratory and non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, researchers attempted to evaluate the performance of facial recognition algorithms on faces partially covered by protective masks. They report that the 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms from Panasonic, Canon, Tencent, and others they tested had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching digitally applied masks with photos of the same person without a mask. "With the arrival of the pandemic, we need to understand how face recognition technology deals with masked faces," Mei Ngan, a NIST computer scientist and a coauthor of the report, said in a statement. "We have begun by focusing on how an algorithm developed before the pandemic might be affected by subjects wearing face masks. Later this summer, we plan to test the accuracy of algorithms that were intentionally developed with masked faces in mind."

The implementation of robust, stable, and user-centered data analytics and machine learning models is confronted by numerous challenges in production and manufacturing. Therefore, a systematic approach is required to develop, evaluate, and deploy such models. The data-driven knowledge discovery framework provides an orderly partition of the data-mining processes to ensure the practical implementation of data analytics and machine learning models. However, the practical application of robust industry-specific data-driven knowledge discovery models faces multiple data-- and model-development--related issues. These issues should be carefully addressed by allowing a flexible, customized, and industry-specific knowledge discovery framework; in our case, this takes the form of the cross-industry standard process for data mining (CRISP-DM). This framework is designed to ensure active cooperation between different phases to adequately address data- and model-related issues. In this paper, we review several extensions of CRISP-DM models and various data-robustness-- and model-robustness--related problems in machine learning, which currently lacks proper cooperation between data experts and business experts because of the limitations of data-driven knowledge discovery models.

Neural networks achieve outstanding accuracy in classification and regression tasks. However, understanding their behavior still remains an open challenge that requires questions to be addressed on the robustness, explainability and reliability of predictions. We answer these questions by computing reachable sets of neural networks, i.e. sets of outputs resulting from continuous sets of inputs. We provide two efficient approaches that lead to over- and under-approximations of the reachable set. This principle is highly versatile, as we show. First, we analyze and enhance the robustness properties of both classifiers and regression models. This is in contrast to existing works, which only handle classification. Specifically, we verify (non-)robustness, propose a robust training procedure, and show that our approach outperforms adversarial attacks as well as state-of-the-art methods of verifying classifiers for non-norm bound perturbations. We also provide a technique of distinguishing between reliable and non-reliable predictions for unlabeled inputs, quantify the influence of each feature on a prediction, and compute a feature ranking.

The Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation, or LOOCV, procedure is used to estimate the performance of machine learning algorithms when they are used to make predictions on data not used to train the model. It is a computationally expensive procedure to perform, although it results in a reliable and unbiased estimate of model performance. Although simple to use and no configuration to specify, there are times when the procedure should not be used, such as when you have a very large dataset or a computationally expensive model to evaluate. In this tutorial, you will discover how to evaluate machine learning models using leave-one-out cross-validation. LOOCV for Evaluating Machine Learning Algorithms Photo by Heather Harvey, some rights reserved.