Membership inference determines, given a sample and trained parameters of a machine learning model, whether the sample was part of the training set. In this paper, we derive the optimal strategy for membership inference with a few assumptions on the distribution of the parameters. We show that optimal attacks only depend on the loss function, and thus black-box attacks are as good as white-box attacks. As the optimal strategy is not tractable, we provide approximations of it leading to several inference methods, and show that existing membership inference methods are coarser approximations of this optimal strategy. Our membership attacks outperform the state of the art in various settings, ranging from a simple logistic regression to more complex architectures and datasets, such as ResNet-101 and Imagenet.

An e xtreme wind speed estimation method that consider s wind hazard climate type s is critical for design wind load calculation for building structure s affected by mixed climate s . However, it is very difficult to obtain wind hazard climate type s from meteorologi cal data records, because they restrict the application of extreme wind speed estimation in mixed climates . This paper first proposes a wind hazard type identification algorithm based on a numerical pattern recognition method that utilizes feature extraction and generalization . Next, it compares six commonly used machine learning models using K - fold cross - validation. Finally, it takes meteorological data from three locations near the southeast coast of China as example s to examine t he algor ithm's performance . Based on classification results, the extreme wind speed s calculated based on mixed wind hazard types is compared with those obtained from conventional methods, and the effects on structural design for different return periods are discus sed . Extreme wind speed; Mixed climates; Data - driven method; Pattern Recognition; Machine Learning; 1. Introduction Wind effects are key factors in structural design, and extreme wind speeds are the starting point . F or flexible structures such as long - span bridges, long - span roofs and high - rise buildings, wind loads are normally the predominant loads. I n order to meet both the ultimate safety and performance requirements of wind - resistant structural design, it s necessary to accurately estimate the extreme wind speed s for different recurrence period s . For significant buildings and infrastructures, it is necessary to estimat e the extreme wind speed through probabilistic methods from local wind speed record s .

Measuring the kurtosis (fourth moment) of a statistical distribution may seem like a pedantic exercise for an introductory statistics class, after one learns about the first moment (mean), second moment (variance), and third moment (skewness). However, kurtosis can be used for some unexpected and significant use cases, particularly when employed as a special case of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for unsupervised learning. ICA is a variant of PCA (Principal Component Analysis) in situations where the data distribution contains subcomponents that are statistically independent of each other, though generally not orthogonal.

Before continuing learning about machine learning algorithms, we introduce the important concept of smoothing. Smoothing is a very powerful technique used all across data analysis. Other names given to this technique are curve fitting and low pass filtering. It is designed to detect trends in the presence of noisy data in cases in which the shape of the trend is unknown. The smoothing name comes from the fact that to accomplish this feat, we assume that the trend is smooth, as in a smooth surface.

While machine learning today is dominated by deep neural network research, in the 1990s neural approaches were not recognized as reliable for real-world applications. Back then, researchers put their efforts into kernel methods and support vector machines (SVM). One of the most notable and respected contributors to kernel methods and SVM is John Shawe-Taylor, a professor at University College London (UK) and Director of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML). His main research area is Statistical Learning Theory, but his contributions range from neural networks to machine learning and graph theory. Shawe-Taylor has published over 300 papers with over 42000 citations.

Despite recent advances of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in various computer vision tasks, their potential for classification of multispectral remote sensing images has not been thoroughly explored. In particular, the applications of deep CNNs using optical remote sensing data have focused on the classification of very high-resolution aerial and satellite data, owing to the similarity of these data to the large datasets in computer vision. Accordingly, this study presents a detailed investigation of state-of-the-art deep learning tools for classification of complex wetland classes using multispectral RapidEye optical imagery. Specifically, we examine the capacity of seven well-known deep convnets, namely DenseNet121, InceptionV3, VGG16, VGG19, Xception, ResNet50, and InceptionResNetV2, for wetland mapping in Canada. In addition, the classification results obtained from deep CNNs are compared with those based on conventional machine learning tools, including Random Forest and Support Vector Machine, to further evaluate the efficiency of the former to classify wetlands. The results illustrate that the full-training of convnets using five spectral bands outperforms the other strategies for all convnets. InceptionResNetV2, ResNet50, and Xception are distinguished as the top three convnets, providing state-of-the-art classification accuracies of 96.17%, 94.81%, and 93.57%, respectively. The classification accuracies obtained using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) are 74.89% and 76.08%, respectively, considerably inferior relative to CNNs. Importantly, InceptionResNetV2 is consistently found to be superior compared to all other convnets, suggesting the integration of Inception and ResNet modules is an efficient architecture for classifying complex remote sensing scenes such as wetlands.

Recently, the development and implementation of phishing attacks require little technical skills and costs. This uprising has led to an ever-growing number of phishing attacks on the World Wide Web daily. Consequently, proactive techniques to fight phishing attacks have become extremely necessary. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model HTMLPhish based on the HTML analysis of a web page for accurate phishing attack detection. By using our proposed HTMLPhish, the experimental results on a dataset of over 300,000 web pages yielded 97.2% accuracy, which significantly outperforms the traditional machine learning methods such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Logistics Regression. We also show the advantage of HTMLPhish in the aspect of the temporal stability and robustness by testing our proposed model on a dataset collected after two months when the model was trained. In addition, HTMLPhish is a completely language-independent and client-side strategy which can, therefore, conduct web page phishing detection regardless of the textual language.

These notes gather recent results on robust statistical learning theory. The goal is to stress the main principles underlying the construction and theoretical analysis of these estimators rather than provide an exhaustive account on this rapidly growing field. The notes are the basis of lectures given at the conference StatMathAppli 2019.

Aim: To review how machine learning (ML) is applied to imaging biomarkers in neuro-oncology, in particular for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment response monitoring. Materials and Methods: The PubMed and MEDLINE databases were searched for articles published before September 2018 using relevant search terms. The search strategy focused on articles applying ML to high-grade glioma biomarkers for treatment response monitoring, prognosis, and prediction. Results: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is typically used throughout the patient pathway because routine structural imaging provides detailed anatomical and pathological information and advanced techniques provide additional physiological detail. Using carefully chosen image features, ML is frequently used to allow accurate classification in a variety of scenarios. Rather than being chosen by human selection, ML also enables image features to be identified by an algorithm. Much research is applied to determining molecular profiles, histological tumour grade, and prognosis using MRI images acquired at the time that patients first present with a brain tumour. Differentiating a treatment response from a post-treatment-related effect using imaging is clinically important and also an area of active study (described here in one of two Special Issue publications dedicated to the application of ML in glioma imaging). Conclusion: Although pioneering, most of the evidence is of a low level, having been obtained retrospectively and in single centres. Studies applying ML to build neuro-oncology monitoring biomarker models have yet to show an overall advantage over those using traditional statistical methods. Development and validation of ML models applied to neuro-oncology require large, well-annotated datasets, and therefore multidisciplinary and multi-centre collaborations are necessary.

Short-and-sparse deconvolution (SaSD) is the problem of extracting localized, recurring motifs in signals with spatial or temporal structure. Variants of this problem arise in applications such as image deblurring, microscopy, neural spike sorting, and more. The problem is challenging in both theory and practice, as natural optimization formulations are nonconvex. Moreover, practical deconvolution problems involve smooth motifs (kernels) whose spectra decay rapidly, resulting in poor conditioning and numerical challenges. This paper is motivated by recent theoretical advances, which characterize the optimization landscape of a particular nonconvex formulation of SaSD. This is used to derive a $provable$ algorithm which exactly solves certain non-practical instances of the SaSD problem. We leverage the key ideas from this theory (sphere constraints, data-driven initialization) to develop a $practical$ algorithm, which performs well on data arising from a range of application areas. We highlight key additional challenges posed by the ill-conditioning of real SaSD problems, and suggest heuristics (acceleration, continuation, reweighting) to mitigate them. Experiments demonstrate both the performance and generality of the proposed method.