Money laundering is a major global problem, enabling criminal organisations to hide their ill-gotten gains and to finance further operations. Prevention of money laundering is seen as a high priority by many governments, however detection of money laundering without prior knowledge of predicate crimes remains a significant challenge. Previous detection systems have tended to focus on individuals, considering transaction histories and applying anomaly detection to identify suspicious behaviour. However, money laundering involves groups of collaborating individuals and evidence of money laundering may only be apparent when the collective behaviour of these groups is considered. In this paper we describe a detection system that is capable of analysing group behaviour, using a combination of network analysis and supervised learning. This system is designed for real-world application and operates on networks consisting of millions of interacting parties. Evaluation of the system using real-world data indicates that suspicious activity is successfully detected. Importantly, the system exhibits a low rate of false positives, and is therefore suitable for use in a live intelligence environment.

In this thesis we present the novel semi-supervised network-based algorithm P-Net, which is able to rank and classify patients with respect to a specific phenotype or clinical outcome under study. The peculiar and innovative characteristic of this method is that it builds a network of samples/patients, where the nodes represent the samples and the edges are functional or genetic relationships between individuals (e.g. similarity of expression profiles), to predict the phenotype under study. In other words, it constructs the network in the "sample space" and not in the "biomarker space" (where nodes represent biomolecules (e.g. genes, proteins) and edges represent functional or genetic relationships between nodes), as usual in state-of-the-art methods. To assess the performances of P-Net, we apply it on three different publicly available datasets from patients afflicted with a specific type of tumor: pancreatic cancer, melanoma and ovarian cancer dataset, by using the data and following the experimental set-up proposed in two recently published papers [Barter et al., 2014, Winter et al., 2012]. We show that network-based methods in the "sample space" can achieve results competitive with classical supervised inductive systems. Moreover, the graph representation of the samples can be easily visualized through networks and can be used to gain visual clues about the relationships between samples, taking into account the phenotype associated or predicted for each sample. To our knowledge this is one of the first works that proposes graph-based algorithms working in the "sample space" of the biomolecular profiles of the patients to predict their phenotype or outcome, thus contributing to a novel research line in the framework of the Network Medicine.

Calculating precision and recall is actually quite easy. Imagine there are 100 positive cases among 10,000 cases. You want to predict which ones are positive, and you pick 200 to have a better chance of catching many of the 100 positive cases. You record the IDs of your predictions, and when you get the actual results you sum up how many times you were right or wrong.

A common approach in positive-unlabeled learning is to train a classification model between labeled and unlabeled data. This strategy is in fact known to give an optimal classifier under mild conditions; however, it results in biased empirical estimates of the classifier performance. In this work, we show that the typically used performance measures such as the receiver operating characteristic curve, or the precision-recall curve obtained on such data can be corrected with the knowledge of class priors; i.e., the proportions of the positive and negative examples in the unlabeled data. We extend the results to a noisy setting where some of the examples labeled positive are in fact negative and show that the correction also requires the knowledge of the proportion of noisy examples in the labeled positives. Using state-of-the-art algorithms to estimate the positive class prior and the proportion of noise, we experimentally evaluate two correction approaches and demonstrate their efficacy on real-life data.

Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily–from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook. More recently, machine learning has entered the public consciousness because of advances in "deep learning"–these include AlphaGo's defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and impressive new products around image recognition and machine translation. In this series, we'll give an introduction to some powerful but generally applicable techniques in machine learning. These include deep learning but also more traditional methods that are often all the modern business needs. After reading the articles in the series, you should have the knowledge necessary to embark on concrete machine learning experiments in a variety of areas on your own.

The success of kernel methods has initiated the design of novel positive semidefinite functions, in particular for structured data. A leading design paradigm for this is the convolution kernel, which decomposes structured objects into their parts and sums over all pairs of parts. Assignment kernels, in contrast, are obtained from an optimal bijection between parts, which can provide a more valid notion of similarity. In general however, optimal assignments yield indefinite functions, which complicates their use in kernel methods. We characterize a class of base kernels used to compare parts that guarantees positive semidefinite optimal assignment kernels. These base kernels give rise to hierarchies from which the optimal assignment kernels are computed in linear time by histogram intersection. We apply these results by developing the Weisfeiler-Lehman optimal assignment kernel for graphs. It provides high classification accuracy on widely-used benchmark data sets improving over the original Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel.

WrestleMania 33 is still more than two months away, but the pieces for the match card are falling into place. Following the Royal Rumble, there is a much better sense of which matches will headline WWE's biggest show of 2017. WrestleMania 32 featured 12 matches and six hours of wrestling, and the pay-per-view on April 2 in Orlando should be similar. Much of the card will be determined by what happens at Elimination Chamber on Feb. 12 and Fastlane on March 5. Rumors have been circulating for weeks regarding the potential WrestleMania 33 match card, and recent events indicate that some of the reports are correct. Plans are constantly changing in WWE, though it isn't hard to guess who certain wrestlers will face on the "grandest stage of them all."

Consider the tragedy of a child killed by neglect and abuse. Now consider the tragedy of a child taken from parents who would not have criminally abused her. Computer algorithms might soon help humans make such difficult decisions -- but only if we recognize the myriad ways in which they can go wrong. In countless cities across the nation, child welfare services make extremely tough calls every day. With limited resources and information, they must often rely on gut instinct in predicting who is most vulnerable.

Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily–from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook. More recently, machine learning has entered the public consciousness because of advances in "deep learning"–these include AlphaGo's defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and impressive new products around image recognition and machine translation. In this series, we'll give an introduction to some powerful but generally applicable techniques in machine learning. These include deep learning but also more traditional methods that are often all the modern business needs. After reading the articles in the series, you should have the knowledge necessary to embark on concrete machine learning experiments in a variety of areas on your own.

The 2017 Royal Rumble is one of the most unpredictable in recent memory. A number of WWE superstars have a legitimate chance to win a spot in the main event of WrestleMania 33, and the title matches on the pay-per-view are not easy to call. The Undertaker, Braun Strowman, Finn Balor and Randy Orton are among just a few wrestlers that could win the 30-man battle royal. Both John Cena and Roman Reigns are fighting for world titles, though it wouldn't be shocking to see either AJ Styles or Kevin Owens retain the belts in those matches. With three matches on the pre-show and five more on the PPV, Sunday's event is likely to last for close to six hours.