Feature selection is a crucial preprocessing step in data analytics and machine learning. Classical feature selection algorithms select features based on the correlations between predictive features and the class variable and do not attempt to capture causal relationships between them. It has been shown that the knowledge about the causal relationships between features and the class variable has potential benefits for building interpretable and robust prediction models, since causal relationships imply the underlying mechanism of a system. Consequently, causality-based feature selection has gradually attracted greater attentions and many algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in causality-based feature selection. To facilitate the development of new algorithms in the research area and make it easy for the comparisons between new methods and existing ones, we develop the first open-source package, called CausalFS, which consists of most of the representative causality-based feature selection algorithms (available at https://github.com/kuiy/CausalFS). Using CausalFS, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the representative algorithms with both synthetic and real-world data sets. Finally, we discuss some challenging problems to be tackled in future causality-based feature selection research.

Outlier detection and novelty detection are two important topics for anomaly detection. Suppose the majority of a dataset are drawn from a certain distribution, outlier detection and novelty detection both aim to detect data samples that do not fit the distribution. Outliers refer to data samples within this dataset, while novelties refer to new samples. In the meantime, backdoor poisoning attacks for machine learning models are achieved through injecting poisoning samples into the training dataset, which could be regarded as "outliers" that are intentionally added by attackers. Differential privacy has been proposed to avoid leaking any individual's information, when aggregated analysis is performed on a given dataset. It is typically achieved by adding random noise, either directly to the input dataset, or to intermediate results of the aggregation mechanism. In this paper, we demonstrate that applying differential privacy can improve the utility of outlier detection and novelty detection, with an extension to detect poisoning samples in backdoor attacks. We first present a theoretical analysis on how differential privacy helps with the detection, and then conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of differential privacy in improving outlier detection, novelty detection, and backdoor attack detection.

From Equifax to Yahoo, and Facebook to Marriott, large-scale data breaches impacting hundreds of millions of consumers have received their fair share of media attention in recent years. All this ink hasn't been spilled (or pixels displayed) in vain: there's growing awareness among business leaders of the security and privacy risks their organizations face, and increasing concern that their preparedness may be inadequate. In a recent PwC survey, for example, 72% of CEOs worldwide listed cybercriminal activity as a significant threat to their businesses, yet only 35% were comfortable with their organization's digital resilience and readiness to face such threats. Especially among small and mid-sized enterprises, the growth in awareness of the severity and urgency of cybersecurity risks is driving demand for managed security services. Organizations are increasingly turning to external vendors to help them build, maintain, and monitor their security operations programs and the technologies that comprise them.

Recent studies on fairness in automated decision making systems have both investigated the potential future impact of these decisions on the population at large, and emphasized that imposing ''typical'' fairness constraints such as demographic parity or equality of opportunity does not guarantee a benefit to disadvantaged groups. However, these previous studies have focused on either simple one-step cost/benefit criteria, or on discrete underlying state spaces. In this work, we first propose a natural continuous representation of population state, governed by the Beta distribution, using a loan granting setting as a running example. Next, we apply a model of population dynamics under lending decisions, and show that when conditional payback probabilities are estimated correctly 1) ``optimal'' behavior by lenders can lead to ''Matthew Effect'' bifurcations (i.e., ''the rich get richer and the poor get poorer''), but that 2) many common fairness constraints on the allowable policies cause groups to converge to the same equilibrium point. Last, we contrast our results in the case of misspecified conditional probability estimates with prior work, and show that for this model, different levels of group misestimation guarantees that even fair policies lead to bifurcations. We illustrate some of the modeling conclusions on real data from credit scoring.

Neural network interpretability is a vital component for applications across a wide variety of domains. In such cases it is often useful to analyze a network which has already been trained for its specific purpose. In this work, we develop a method to produce explanation masks for pre-trained networks. Masks are created by a secondary network whose goal is to create as small an explanation as possible while still preserving the predictive accuracy of the original network. We demonstrate the applicability of our method for image classification with CNNs, sentiment analysis with RNNs, and chemical property prediction with mixed CNN/RNN architectures. 1 Introduction Network interpretability remains a required feature for machine learning systems in many domains.

Recent research has found that many families of machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples: inputs that are specifically designed to cause the target model to produce erroneous outputs. In this survey, we focus on machine learning models in the visual domain, where methods for generating and detecting such examples have been most extensively studied. We explore a variety of adversarial attack methods that apply to image-space content, real world adversarial attacks, adversarial defenses, and the transferability property of adversarial examples. We also discuss strengths and weaknesses of various methods of adversarial attack and defense. Our aim is to provide an extensive coverage of the field, furnishing the reader with an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of adversarial attack and defense mechanisms and enlarging the community of researchers studying this fundamental set of problems.

The Pima Indians of Arizona and Mexico have the highest reported prevalence of diabetes of any population in the world. A small study has been conducted to analyse their medical records to assess if it is possible to predict the onset of diabetes based on diagnostic measures. The dataset is downloaded from Kaggle, where all patients included are females at least 21 years old of Pima Indian heritage. The objective of this project is to build a predictive machine learning model to predict based on diagnostic measurements whether a patient has diabetes. This is a binary (2-class) classification project with supervised learning. Jupyter Notebook could be used to follow the process below.

We present ProxiModel, a novel event mining framework for extracting high-quality structured event knowledge from large, redundant, and noisy news data sources. The proposed model differentiates itself from other approaches by modeling both the event correlation within each individual document as well as across the corpus. To facilitate this, we introduce the concept of a proximity-network, a novel space-efficient data structure to facilitate scalable event mining. This proximity network captures the corpus-level co-occurence statistics for candidate event descriptors, event attributes, as well as their connections. We probabilistically model the proximity network as a generative process with sparsity-inducing regularization. This allows us to efficiently and effectively extract high-quality and interpretable news events. Experiments on three different news corpora demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and robust at generating high-quality event descriptors and attributes. We briefly detail many interesting applications from our proposed framework such as news summarization, event tracking and multi-dimensional analysis on news. Finally, we explore a case study on visualizing the events for a Japan Tsunami news corpus and demonstrate ProxiModel's ability to automatically summarize emerging news events.

Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College LondonAbstract Sensitive inferences and user re-identification are major threats to privacy when raw sensor data from wearable or portable devices are shared with cloud-assisted applications. To mitigate these threats, we propose mechanisms to transform sensor data before sharing them with applications running on users' devices. These transformations aim at eliminating patterns that can be used for user re-identification or for inferring potentially sensitive activities, while introducing a minor utility loss for the target application (or task). We show that, on gesture and activity recognition tasks, we can prevent inference of potentially sensitive activities while keeping the reduction in recognition accuracy of nonsensitive activities to less than 5 percentage points. We also show that we can reduce the accuracy of user re-identification and of the potential inference of gender to the level of a random guess, while keeping the accuracy of activity recognition comparable to that obtained on the original data.1. Introduction Sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, embedded in personal smart devices generate data that can be used to monitor users' activities, interactions, and mood [1, 2, 3]. Applications (apps) installed on smart devices can get access to raw sensor data to make required(i.e. However, sensor data can also facilitate some potentially sensitive ( i.e. undesired) inferences that a user might wish to keep private, such as discovering smoking habits [4] or revealing personal attributes such as age and gender [5]. Some patterns in raw sensor data may also enable user re-identification [6]. Information privacy can be defined as "the right to select what personal information about me is known to what people" [7].

Machine learning (ML) is routinely used by countless businesses to assist with decision making. In most cases, however, the predictions and business decisions made by ML systems still require the intuition of human users to make judgment calls. In this post, I show how to combine ML with sensitivity analysis to develop a data-driven business strategy. This post focuses on customer churn (that is, the defection of customers to competitors), while covering problems that often arise when using ML-based analysis. These problems include difficulties with handling incomplete and unbalanced data, deriving strategic options, and quantitatively evaluating the potential impact of those options.