Performance Analysis
Joint Detection of Malicious Domains and Infected Clients
Prasse, Paul, Knaebel, Rene, Machlica, Lukas, Pevny, Tomas, Scheffer, Tobias
Detection of malware-infected computers and detection of malicious web domains based on their encrypted HTTPS traffic are challenging problems, because only addresses, timestamps, and data volumes are observable. The detection problems are coupled, because infected clients tend to interact with malicious domains. Traffic data can be collected at a large scale, and antivirus tools can be used to identify infected clients in retrospect. Domains, by contrast, have to be labeled individually after forensic analysis. We explore transfer learning based on sluice networks; this allows the detection models to bootstrap each other. In a large-scale experimental study, we find that the model outperforms known reference models and detects previously unknown malware, previously unknown malware families, and previously unknown malicious domains.
A Novel Deep Transfer Learning Method for Detection of Myocardial Infarction
Myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a cardiac attack, is one of the common cardiac disorders occurs when one or more coronary arteries are blocked. Hence, early detection of MI is critical for the reduction of the rising of the death rate. The cardiologists use the electrocardiogram (ECG) as a diagnostic tool to monitor and reveal the MI signals. However, all the MI signals are not constant and noisy, so it is tough to detect or observe these signals manually. Several computer-aided diagnosis systems (CADs) have been suggested to solve these difficulties. In this paper, we have proposed an effective CAD system to detect MI signals using the two-dimensional convolution neural network (CNN). In this study, we have employed two ways of the transfer learning technique to retrain the pre-trained VGG-Net and obtained two new networks VGG-MI1 and VGG-MI2. Moreover, the heartbeat data augmentation techniques are employed to increase the classification performance. We have utilized two-second ECG signals from the PTB database, which has been widely employed in MI detection studies. In case of using VGG-MI1, we achieved an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.02%, 98.76%, and 99.17% respectively and we achieved an accuracy of 99.22%, a sensitivity of 99.15%, and a specificity of 99.49% when using VGG-MI2. Results showed that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy sensitivity, and specificity. Finally, the proposed algorithm can assist the specialists to detect the MI signals more precisely.
Unsupervised Ensemble Classification with Dependent Data
Traganitis, Panagiotis A., Giannakis, Georgios B.
Ensemble learning, the machine learning paradigm where multiple algorithms are combined, has exhibited promising perfomance in a variety of tasks. The present work focuses on unsupervised ensemble classification. The term unsupervised refers to the ensemble combiner who has no knowledge of the ground-truth labels that each classifier has been trained on. While most prior works on unsupervised ensemble classification are designed for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, the present work introduces an unsupervised scheme for learning from ensembles of classifiers in the presence of data dependencies. Two types of data dependencies are considered: sequential data and networked data whose dependencies are captured by a graph. Moment matching and Expectation Maximization algorithms are developed for the aforementioned cases, and their performance is evaluated on synthetic and real datasets.
On Tree-based Methods for Similarity Learning
Clรฉmenรงon, Stรฉphan, Vogel, Robin
In many situations, the choice of an adequate similarity measure or metric on the feature space dramatically determines the performance of machine learning methods. Building automatically such measures is the specific purpose of metric/similarity learning. In Vogel et al. (2018), similarity learning is formulated as a pairwise bipartite ranking problem: ideally, the larger the probability that two observations in the feature space belong to the same class (or share the same label), the higher the similarity measure between them. From this perspective, the ROC curve is an appropriate performance criterion and it is the goal of this article to extend recursive tree-based ROC optimization techniques in order to propose efficient similarity learning algorithms. The validity of such iterative partitioning procedures in the pairwise setting is established by means of results pertaining to the theory of U-processes and from a practical angle, it is discussed at length how to implement them by means of splitting rules specifically tailored to the similarity learning task. Beyond these theoretical/methodological contributions, numerical experiments are displayed and provide strong empirical evidence of the performance of the algorithmic approaches we propose.
Alexa could detect whether you're having a heart attack, study suggests
A New Jersey woman is alive because her Apple Watch alerted her to an elevated heart rate. It turned out she had fluid around her heart from a viral infection. Medical alert systems have been around for some time. Often, they're wearable devices that can detect when you fall, and alert emergency personnel if it senses you aren't responding. But what happens if you aren't wearing a device, or if you aren't experiencing any triggering signs or symptoms of a medical emergency at all?
Effective degrees of freedom for surface finish defect detection and classification
Arnqvist, Natalya Pya, Ngendangenzwa, Blaise, Lindahl, Eric, Nilsson, Leif, Yu, Jun
One of the primary concerns of product quality control in the automotive industry is an automated detection of defects of small sizes on specular car body surfaces. A new statistical learning approach is presented for surface finish defect detection based on spline smoothing method for feature extraction and $k$-nearest neighbour probabilistic classifier. Since the surfaces are specular, structured lightning reflection technique is applied for image acquisition. Reduced rank cubic regression splines are used to smooth the pixel values while the effective degrees of freedom of the obtained smooths serve as components of the feature vector. A key advantage of the approach is that it allows reaching near zero misclassification error rate when applying standard learning classifiers. We also propose probability based performance evaluation metrics as alternatives to the conventional metrics. The usage of those provides the means for uncertainty estimation of the predictive performance of a classifier. Experimental classification results on the images obtained from the pilot system located at Volvo GTO Cab plant in Ume{\aa}, Sweden, show that the proposed approach is much more efficient than the compared methods.
Low-dimensional Embodied Semantics for Music and Language
Raposo, Francisco Afonso, de Matos, David Martins, Ribeiro, Ricardo
Embodied cognition states that semantics is encoded in the brain as firing patterns of neural circuits, which are learned according to the statistical structure of human multimodal experience. However, each human brain is idiosyncratically biased, according to its subjective experience history, making this biological semantic machinery noisy with respect to the overall semantics inherent to media artifacts, such as music and language excerpts. We propose to represent shared semantics using low-dimensional vector embeddings by jointly modeling several brains from human subjects. We show these unsupervised efficient representations outperform the original high-dimensional fMRI voxel spaces in proxy music genre and language topic classification tasks. We further show that joint modeling of several subjects increases the semantic richness of the learned latent vector spaces.
Finding Needles in a Moving Haystack: Prioritizing Alerts with Adversarial Reinforcement Learning
Tong, Liang, Laszka, Aron, Yan, Chao, Zhang, Ning, Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy
Detection of malicious behavior is a fundamental problem in security. One of the major challenges in using detection systems in practice is in dealing with an overwhelming number of alerts that are triggered by normal behavior (the so-called false positives), obscuring alerts resulting from actual malicious activity. While numerous methods for reducing the scope of this issue have been proposed, ultimately one must still decide how to prioritize which alerts to investigate, and most existing prioritization methods are heuristic, for example, based on suspiciousness or priority scores. We introduce a novel approach for computing a policy for prioritizing alerts using adversarial reinforcement learning. Our approach assumes that the attackers know the full state of the detection system and dynamically choose an optimal attack as a function of this state, as well as of the alert prioritization policy. The first step of our approach is to capture the interaction between the defender and attacker in a game theoretic model. To tackle the computational complexity of solving this game to obtain a dynamic stochastic alert prioritization policy, we propose an adversarial reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, we use neural reinforcement learning to compute best response policies for both the defender and the adversary to an arbitrary stochastic policy of the other. We then use these in a double-oracle framework to obtain an approximate equilibrium of the game, which in turn yields a robust stochastic policy for the defender. Extensive experiments using case studies in fraud and intrusion detection demonstrate that our approach is effective in creating robust alert prioritization policies.
Amazon Alexa could pick up on a patient in cardiac arrest
The research was led by Justin Chan, a PhD student in the department of computer science and engineering. Almost 500,000 Americans die each year from a cardiac arrest, the researchers wrote in the journal npj Digital Medicine. And the condition kills 100,000 Britons annually, according to Arrhythmia Alliance. Study author Dr Jacob Sunshine, assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine, said: 'Cardiac arrests are a very common way for people to die and right now many of them can go unwitnessed. 'Part of what makes this technology so compelling is that it could help us catch more patients in time for them to be treated.'
Novel AI Model Predicts Breast Cancer as well as Doctors
Published today in the peer-reviewed journal Radiology, an IBM Research team created a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that can predict breast cancer malignancy and identify normal digital mammography exams as accurately as radiologists. Mammography, a low-dose x-ray procedure to image breasts, is considered the best breast cancer screening test available according to the American Cancer Society. However, mammograms are not always accurate. According to a U.S. 10-year study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 23.8 percent of study participants had at least one false positive mammogram where breast cancer was not actually present. Furthermore, the American Cancer Society estimates that one in five screening mammograms are false-negatives that fail to detect existing breast cancer.