Most of the existing solutions to enterprise threat management are preventive approaches prescribing means to prevent policy violations with varying degrees of success. In this paper we consider the complementary scenario where a number of security violations have already occurred, or security threats, or vulnerabilities have been reported and a security administrator needs to generate optimal response to these security events. We present a principled approach to study and model the human expertise in responding to the emergent threats owing to these security events. A recursive Partial Least Squares based adaptive learning model is defined using a factorial analysis of the security events together with a method for estimating the effect of global context dependent semantic information used by the security administrators. Presented model is theoretically optimal and operationally recursive in nature to deal with the set of security events being generated continuously. We discuss the underlying challenges and ways in which the model could be operationalized in centralized versus decentralized, and real-time versus batch processing modes.

Welcome to the first (or 0th) part of the series! Together we will explore the limits of what is possible (and probably impossible) with the current state of using JavaScript for Machine Learning in the browser! The complete source code can be found on GitHub if you want to follow along. Additionally, I've included a gist showing the complete JavaScript code at the end of the post. Here is a link to a Live Demo, you must open your browser console to see the results.

In this study, we predict the outcome of the football matches in the FIFA World Cup 2018 to be held in Russia this summer. We do this using classification models over a dataset of historic football results that includes attributes from the playing teams by rating them in attack, midfield, defence, aggression, pressure, chance creation and building ability. This last training data was a result of merging international matches results with AE games ratings of the teams considering the timeline of the matches with their respective statistics. Final predictions show the four countries with the most chances of getting to the semifinals as France, Brazil, Spain and Germany while giving Spain as the winner. The objective of this study is to build a predictive model that will allow us to make good predictions for the coming World Cup 2018 so we looked for dataset with historic data for match results, for this purpose we chose a dataset from Kaggle with data of almost 40,000 international matches played between 1872 and 2018.

Predictive analytics in data science rest on the shoulders of explanatory data analysis, which is precisely what we were discussing in our previous article – The What, Where and How of Data for Data Science. We talked about data in data science, and how business intelligence (BI) analysts use it to explain the past. In fact, everything is connected. Once the BI reports and dashboards have been prepared and insights – extracted from them – this information becomes the basis for predicting future values. And the accuracy of these predictions lies in the methods used.

The task of calibration is to retrospectively adjust the outputs from a machine learning model to provide better probability estimates on the target variable. While calibration has been investigated thoroughly in classification, it has not yet been well-established for regression tasks. This paper considers the problem of calibrating a probabilistic regression model to improve the estimated probability densities over the real-valued targets. We propose to calibrate a regression model through the cumulative probability density, which can be derived from calibrating a multi-class classifier. We provide three non-parametric approaches to solve the problem, two of which provide empirical estimates and the third providing smooth density estimates. The proposed approaches are experimentally evaluated to show their ability to improve the performance of regression models on the predictive likelihood.

Many estimators of the average causal effect of an intervention require estimation of the propensity score, the outcome regression, or both. For these estimators, we must carefully con- sider how to estimate the relevant regressions. It is often beneficial to utilize flexible techniques such as semiparametric regression or machine learning. However, optimal estimation of the regression function does not necessarily lead to optimal estimation of the average causal effect. Therefore, it is important to consider criteria for evaluating regression estimators and selecting hyper-parameters. A recent proposal addressed these issues via the outcome-adaptive lasso, a penalized regression technique for estimating the propensity score. We build on this proposal and offer a method that is simultaneously more flexible and more efficient than the previous pro- posal. We propose the outcome-highly-adaptive LASSO, a semi-parametric regression estimator designed to down-weight regions of the confounder space that do not contribute variation to the outcome regression. We show that tuning this method using collaborative targeted learning leads to superior finite-sample performance relative to competing estimators.

Accurate predictions about future events is essential in many areas, one of them being the Tourism Industry. Usually, countries and cities invest a huge amount of money in planning and preparation in order to welcome (and profit from) tourists. An accurate prediction of the number of visits in the following days or months could help both the economy and tourists. Prior studies in this domain explore forecasting for a whole country rather than for fine-grained areas within a country (e.g., specific touristic attractions). In this work, we suggest that accessible data from online social networks and travel websites, in addition to climate data, can be used to support the inference of visitation count for many touristic attractions. To test our hypothesis we analyze visitation, climate and social media data in more than 70 National Parks in U.S during the last 3 years. The experimental results reveal a high correlation between social media data and tourism demands; in fact, in over 80\% of the parks, social media reviews and visitation counts are correlated by more than 50\%. Moreover, we assess the effectiveness of employing various prediction techniques, finding that even a simple linear regression model, when fed with social media and climate data as input features, can attain a prediction accuracy of over 80\% while a more robust algorithm, such as Support Vector Regression, reaches up to 94\% accuracy.

Machine learning is part art and part science. When you look at machine learning algorithms, there is no one solution or one approach that fits all. There are several factors that can affect your decision to choose a machine learning algorithm. Some problems are very specific and require a unique approach. E.g. if you look at a recommender system, it's a very common type of machine learning algorithm and it solves a very specific kind of problem. While some other problems are very open and need a trial & error approach.

We present safe active incremental f eature selection (SAIF) to scale up the computation of LASSO solutions. SAIF does not require a solution from a heavier penalty parameter as in sequential screening or updating the full model for each iteration as in dynamic screening. Different from these existing screening methods, SAIF starts from a small number of features and incrementally recruits active features and updates the significantly reduced model. Hence, it is much more computationally efficient and scalable with the number of features. More critically, SAIF has the safe guarantee as it has the convergence guarantee to the optimal solution to the original full LASSO problem. Such an incremental procedure and theoretical convergence guarantee can be extended to fused LASSO problems. Compared with state-of-the-art screening methods as well as working set and homotopy methods, which may not always guarantee the optimal solution, SAIF can achieve superior or comparable efficiency and high scalability with the safe guarantee when facing extremely high dimensional data sets. Experiments with both synthetic and real-world data sets show that SAIF can be up to 50 times faster than dynamic screening, and hundreds of times faster than computing LASSO or fused LASSO solutions without screening.

We present an approach to identify concise equations from data using a shallow neural network approach. In contrast to ordinary black-box regression, this approach allows understanding functional relations and generalizing them from observed data to unseen parts of the parameter space. We show how to extend the class of learnable equations for a recently proposed equation learning network to include divisions, and we improve the learning and model selection strategy to be useful for challenging real-world data. For systems governed by analytical expressions, our method can in many cases identify the true underlying equation and extrapolate to unseen domains. We demonstrate its effectiveness by experiments on a cart-pendulum system, where only 2 random rollouts are required to learn the forward dynamics and successfully achieve the swing-up task.