Medical internet of things leads to revolutionary im- provements in medical services, also known as smart healthcare. With the big healthcare data, data mining and machine learning can assist wellness management and intelligent diagnosis, and achieve the P4-medicine. However, healthcare data has high spar- sity and heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Transferring Prediction System (HTPS). Feature engineering mechanism transforms the dataset into sparse and dense feature matrices, and autoencoders in the embedding networks not only embed features but also transfer knowledge from heterogeneous datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed HTPS outperforms the benchmark systems on various prediction tasks and datasets, and ablation studies present the effectiveness of each designed mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate the negative impact of heterogeneous data on benchmark systems and the high transferability of the proposed HTPS.
Effectively representing medical concepts and patients is important for healthcare analytical applications. Representing medical concepts for healthcare analytical tasks requires incorporating medical domain knowledge and prior information from patient description data. Current methods, such as feature engineering and mapping medical concepts to standardized terminologies, have limitations in capturing the dynamic patterns from patient description data. Other embedding-based methods have difficulties in incorporating important medical domain knowledge and often require a large amount of training data, which may not be feasible for most healthcare systems. Our proposed framework, MD-Manifold, introduces a novel approach to medical concept and patient representation. It includes a new data augmentation approach, concept distance metric, and patient-patient network to incorporate crucial medical domain knowledge and prior data information. It then adapts manifold learning methods to generate medical concept-level representations that accurately reflect medical knowledge and patient-level representations that clearly identify heterogeneous patient cohorts. MD-Manifold also outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques in various downstream healthcare analytical tasks. Our work has significant implications in information systems research in representation learning, knowledge-driven machine learning, and using design science as middle-ground frameworks for downstream explorative and predictive analyses. Practically, MD-Manifold has the potential to create effective and generalizable representations of medical concepts and patients by incorporating medical domain knowledge and prior data information. It enables deeper insights into medical data and facilitates the development of new analytical applications for better healthcare outcomes.
In recent years, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing has emerged as a promising avenue for addressing the growing computational demands of AI applications. This paper presents a comprehensive study of scalable, distributed AI frameworks leveraging cloud computing for enhanced deep learning performance and efficiency. We first provide an overview of popular AI frameworks and cloud services, highlighting their respective strengths and weaknesses. Next, we delve into the critical aspects of data storage and management in cloud-based AI systems, discussing data preprocessing, feature engineering, privacy, and security. We then explore parallel and distributed training techniques for AI models, focusing on model partitioning, communication strategies, and cloud-based training architectures. In subsequent chapters, we discuss optimization strategies for AI workloads in the cloud, covering load balancing, resource allocation, auto-scaling, and performance benchmarking. We also examine AI model deployment and serving in the cloud, outlining containerization, serverless deployment options, and monitoring best practices. To ensure the cost-effectiveness of cloud-based AI solutions, we present a thorough analysis of costs, optimization strategies, and case studies showcasing successful deployments. Finally, we summarize the key findings of this study, discuss the challenges and limitations of cloud-based AI, and identify emerging trends and future research opportunities in the field.
We introduce SCooLS, our Smart Contract Learning (Semi-supervised) engine. SCooLS uses neural networks to analyze Ethereum contract bytecode and identifies specific vulnerable functions. SCooLS incorporates two key elements: semi-supervised learning and graph neural networks (GNNs). Semi-supervised learning produces more accurate models than unsupervised learning, while not requiring the large oracle-labeled training set that supervised learning requires. GNNs enable direct analysis of smart contract bytecode without any manual feature engineering, predefined patterns, or expert rules. SCooLS is the first application of semi-supervised learning to smart contract vulnerability analysis, as well as the first deep learning-based vulnerability analyzer to identify specific vulnerable functions. SCooLS's performance is better than existing tools, with an accuracy level of 98.4%, an F1 score of 90.5%, and an exceptionally low false positive rate of only 0.8%. Furthermore, SCooLS is fast, analyzing a typical function in 0.05 seconds. We leverage SCooLS's ability to identify specific vulnerable functions to build an exploit generator, which was successful in stealing Ether from 76.9% of the true positives.
We introduce the Deep Learning Vulnerability Analyzer (DLVA) for Ethereum smart contracts based on neural networks. We train DLVA to judge bytecode even though the supervising oracle can only judge source. DLVA's training algorithm is general: we extend a source code analysis to bytecode without any manual feature engineering, predefined patterns, or expert rules. DLVA's training algorithm is also robust: it overcame a 1.25% error rate mislabeled contracts, and--the student surpassing the teacher--found vulnerable contracts that Slither mislabeled. DLVA is much faster than other smart contract vulnerability detectors: DLVA checks contracts for 29 vulnerabilities in 0.2 seconds, a 10-1,000x speedup. DLVA has three key components. First, Smart Contract to Vector (SC2V) uses neural networks to map smart contract bytecode to a high-dimensional floating-point vector. We benchmark SC2V against 4 state-of-the-art graph neural networks and show that it improves model differentiation by 2.2%. Second, Sibling Detector (SD) classifies contracts when a target contract's vector is Euclidian-close to a labeled contract's vector in a training set; although only able to judge 55.7% of the contracts in our test set, it has a Slither-predictive accuracy of 97.4% with a false positive rate of only 0.1%. Third, Core Classifier (CC) uses neural networks to infer vulnerable contracts regardless of vector distance. We benchmark DLVA's CC with 10 ML techniques and show that the CC improves accuracy by 11.3%. Overall, DLVA predicts Slither's labels with an overall accuracy of 92.7% and associated false positive rate of 7.2%. Lastly, we benchmark DLVA against nine well-known smart contract analysis tools. Despite using much less analysis time, DLVA completed every query, leading the pack with an average accuracy of 99.7%, pleasingly balancing high true positive rates with low false positive rates.
We present SkillGPT, a tool for skill extraction and standardization (SES) from free-style job descriptions and user profiles with an open-source Large Language Model (LLM) as backbone. Most previous methods for similar tasks either need supervision or rely on heavy data-preprocessing and feature engineering. Directly prompting the latest conversational LLM for standard skills, however, is slow, costly and inaccurate. In contrast, SkillGPT utilizes a LLM to perform its tasks in steps via summarization and vector similarity search, to balance speed with precision. The backbone LLM of SkillGPT is based on Llama, free for academic use and thus useful for exploratory research and prototype development. Hence, our cost-free SkillGPT gives users the convenience of conversational SES, efficiently and reliably.
In this paper, we study multiple problems from sponsored product optimization in ad system, including position-based de-biasing, click-conversion multi-task learning, and calibration on predicted click-through-rate (pCTR). We propose a practical machine learning framework that provides the solutions to such problems without structural change to existing machine learning models, thus can be combined with most machine learning models including shallow models (e.g. gradient boosting decision trees, support vector machines). In this paper, we first propose data and feature engineering techniques to handle the aforementioned problems in ad system; after that, we evaluate the benefit of our practical framework on real-world data sets from our traffic logs from online shopping site. We show that our proposed practical framework with data and feature engineering can also handle the perennial problems in ad systems and bring increments to multiple evaluation metrics.
Recent advancements in software and hardware technologies have enabled the use of AI/ML models in everyday applications has significantly improved the quality of service rendered. However, for a given application, finding the right AI/ML model is a complex and costly process, that involves the generation, training, and evaluation of multiple interlinked steps (called pipelines), such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, selection, and model tuning. These pipelines are complex (in structure) and costly (both in compute resource and time) to execute end-to-end, with a hyper-parameter associated with each step. AutoML systems automate the search of these hyper-parameters but are slow, as they rely on optimizing the pipeline's end output. We propose the eTOP Framework which works on top of any AutoML system and decides whether or not to execute the pipeline to the end or terminate at an intermediate step. Experimental evaluation on 26 benchmark datasets and integration of eTOPwith MLBox4 reduces the training time of the AutoML system upto 40x than baseline MLBox.
Large language models (LLMs) can perform accurate classification with zero or few examples through in-context learning. We extend this capability to regression with uncertainty estimation using frozen LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5, Gemini), enabling Bayesian optimization (BO) in natural language without explicit model training or feature engineering. We apply this to materials discovery by representing experimental catalyst synthesis and testing procedures as natural language prompts. A key challenge in materials discovery is the need to characterize suboptimal candidates, which slows progress. While BO is effective for navigating large design spaces, standard surrogate models like Gaussian processes assume smoothness and continuity, an assumption that fails in highly non-linear domains such as heterogeneous catalysis. Our task-agnostic BO workflow overcomes this by operating directly in language space, producing interpretable and actionable predictions without requiring structural or electronic descriptors. On benchmarks like aqueous solubility and oxidative coupling of methane (OCM), BO-ICL matches or outperforms Gaussian processes. In live experiments on the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction, BO-ICL identifies near-optimal multi-metallic catalysts within six iterations from a pool of 3,700 candidates. Our method redefines materials representation and accelerates discovery, with broad applications across catalysis, materials science, and AI. Code: https://github.com/ur-whitelab/BO-ICL.
Judging whether an integer can be divided by prime numbers such as 2 or 3 may appear trivial to human beings, but can be less straightforward for computers. Here, we tested multiple deep learning architectures and feature engineering approaches on classifying integers based on their residues when divided by small prime numbers. We found that the ability of classification critically depends on the feature space. We also evaluated Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) platforms from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and found that they failed on this task without appropriately engineered features. Furthermore, we introduced a method that utilizes linear regression on Fourier series basis vectors, and demonstrated its effectiveness. Finally, we evaluated Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, GPT-J, LLaMA and Falcon, and demonstrated their failures. In conclusion, feature engineering remains an important task to improve performance and increase interpretability of machine-learning models, even in the era of AutoML and LLMs.
We propose DoE2Vec, a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based methodology to learn optimization landscape characteristics for downstream meta-learning tasks, e.g., automated selection of optimization algorithms. Principally, using large training data sets generated with a random function generator, DoE2Vec self-learns an informative latent representation for any design of experiments (DoE). Unlike the classical exploratory landscape analysis (ELA) method, our approach does not require any feature engineering and is easily applicable for high dimensional search spaces. For validation, we inspect the quality of latent reconstructions and analyze the latent representations using different experiments. The latent representations not only show promising potentials in identifying similar (cheap-to-evaluate) surrogate functions, but also can significantly boost performances when being used complementary to the classical ELA features in classification tasks.
As retailers around the world increase efforts in developing targeted marketing campaigns for different audiences, predicting accurately which customers are most likely to churn ahead of time is crucial for marketing teams in order to increase business profits. This work presents a deep survival framework to predict which customers are at risk of stopping to purchase with retail companies in non-contractual settings. By leveraging the survival model parameters to be learnt by recurrent neural networks, we are able to obtain individual level survival models for purchasing behaviour based only on individual customer behaviour and avoid time-consuming feature engineering processes usually done when training machine learning models.
We propose and release a new vulnerable source code dataset. We curate the dataset by crawling security issue websites, extracting vulnerability-fixing commits and source codes from the corresponding projects. Our new dataset contains 18,945 vulnerable functions spanning 150 CWEs and 330,492 non-vulnerable functions extracted from 7,514 commits. Our dataset covers 295 more projects than all previous datasets combined. Combining our new dataset with previous datasets, we present an analysis of the challenges and promising research directions of using deep learning for detecting software vulnerabilities. We study 11 model architectures belonging to 4 families. Our results show that deep learning is still not ready for vulnerability detection, due to high false positive rate, low F1 score, and difficulty of detecting hard CWEs. In particular, we demonstrate an important generalization challenge for the deployment of deep learning-based models. We show that increasing the volume of training data may not further improve the performance of deep learning models for vulnerability detection, but might be useful to improve the generalization ability to unseen projects. We also identify hopeful future research directions. We demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) are a promising research direction for ML-based vulnerability detection, outperforming Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with code-structure features in our experiments. Moreover, developing source code specific pre-training objectives is a promising research direction to improve the vulnerability detection performance.
To advance automated detection of extreme weather events, which are increasing in frequency and intensity with climate change, we explore modifications to a novel light-weight Context Guided convolutional neural network architecture trained for semantic segmentation of tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers in climate data. Our primary focus is on tropical cyclones, the most destructive weather events, for which current models show limited performance. We investigate feature engineering, data augmentation, learning rate modifications, alternative loss functions, and architectural changes. In contrast to previous approaches optimizing for intersection over union, we specifically seek to improve recall to penalize under-counting and prioritize identification of tropical cyclones. We report success through the use of weighted loss functions to counter class imbalance for these rare events. We conclude with directions for future research on extreme weather events detection, a crucial task for prediction, mitigation, and equitable adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is a crucial stage in the spectrum management, signal monitoring, and control of wireless communication systems. The accurate classification of the modulation format plays a vital role in the subsequent decoding of the transmitted data. End-to-end deep learning methods have been recently applied to AMC, outperforming traditional feature engineering techniques. However, AMC still has limitations in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments. To address the drawback, we propose a novel AMC-Net that improves recognition by denoising the input signal in the frequency domain while performing multi-scale and effective feature extraction. Experiments on two representative datasets demonstrate that our model performs better in efficiency and effectiveness than the most current methods.
The ability to predict traffic flow over time for crowded areas during rush hours is increasingly important as it can help authorities make informed decisions for congestion mitigation or scheduling of infrastructure development in an area. However, a crucial challenge in traffic flow forecasting is the slow shifting in temporal peaks between daily and weekly cycles, resulting in the nonstationarity of the traffic flow signal and leading to difficulty in accurate forecasting. To address this challenge, we propose a slow shifting concerned machine learning method for traffic flow forecasting, which includes two parts. First, we take advantage of Empirical Mode Decomposition as the feature engineering to alleviate the nonstationarity of traffic flow data, yielding a series of stationary components. Second, due to the superiority of Long-Short-Term-Memory networks in capturing temporal features, an advanced traffic flow forecasting model is developed by taking the stationary components as inputs. Finally, we apply this method on a benchmark of real-world data and provide a comparison with other existing methods. Our proposed method outperforms the state-of-art results by 14.55% and 62.56% using the metrics of root mean squared error and mean absolute percentage error, respectively.
This paper is a work in progress. We are looking for collaborators to provide us financial datasets in Equity/Futures market to conduct more bench-marking studies. The authors have papers employing similar methods applied on the Numerai dataset, which is freely available but obfuscated. We apply different feature engineering methods for time-series to US market price data. The predictive power of models are tested against Numerai-Signals targets.
Most of previous work on learning diacritization of the Arabic language relied on training models from scratch. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained language models to learn diacritization. We finetune token-free pre-trained multilingual models (ByT5) to learn to predict and insert missing diacritics in Arabic text, a complex task that requires understanding the sentence semantics and the morphological structure of the tokens. We show that we can achieve state-of-the-art on the diacritization task with minimal amount of training and no feature engineering, reducing WER by 40%. We release our finetuned models for the greater benefit of the researchers in the community.
Survival analysis is an essential tool for the study of health data. An inherent component of such data is the presence of missing values. In recent years, researchers proposed new learning algorithms for survival tasks based on neural networks. Here, we studied the predictive performance of such algorithms coupled with different methods for handling missing values on simulated data that reflect a realistic situation, i.e., when individuals belong to unobserved clusters. We investigated different patterns of missing data. The results show that, without further feature engineering, no single imputation method is better than the others in all cases. The proposed methodology can be used to compare other missing data patterns and/or survival models. The Python code is accessible via the package survivalsim. -- L'analyse de survie est un outil essentiel pour l'\'etude des donn\'ees de sant\'e. Une composante inh\'erente \`a ces donn\'ees est la pr\'esence de valeurs manquantes. Ces derni\`eres ann\'ees, de nouveaux algorithmes d'apprentissage pour la survie, bas\'es sur les r\'eseaux de neurones, ont \'et\'e con\c{c}us. L'objectif de ce travail est d'\'etudier la performance en pr\'ediction de ces algorithmes coupl\'es \`a diff\'erentes m\'ethodes pour g\'erer les valeurs manquantes, sur des donn\'ees simul\'ees qui refl\`etent une situation rencontr\'ee en pratique, c'est-\`a dire lorsque les individus peuvent \^etre group\'es selon leurs covariables. Diff\'erents sch\'emas de donn\'ees manquantes sont \'etudi\'es. Les r\'esultats montrent que, sans l'ajout de variables suppl\'ementaires, aucune m\'ethode d'imputation n'est meilleure que les autres dans tous les cas. La m\'ethodologie propos\'ee peut \^etre utilis\'ee pour comparer d'autres mod\`eles de survie. Le code en Python est accessible via le package survivalsim.
Attack vectors for adversaries have increased in organizations because of the growing use of less secure IoT devices. The risk of attacks on an organization's network has also increased due to the bring your own device (BYOD) policy which permits employees to bring IoT devices onto the premises and attach them to the organization's network. To tackle this threat and protect their networks, organizations generally implement security policies in which only white listed IoT devices are allowed on the organization's network. To monitor compliance with such policies, it has become essential to distinguish IoT devices permitted within an organization's network from non white listed (unknown) IoT devices. In this research, deep learning is applied to network communication for the automated identification of IoT devices permitted on the network. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed approach does not require complex feature engineering of the network communication, because the 'communication behavior' of IoT devices is represented as small images which are generated from the device's network communication payload. The proposed approach is applicable for any IoT device, regardless of the protocol used for communication. As our approach relies on the network communication payload, it is also applicable for the IoT devices behind a network address translation (NAT) enabled router. In this study, we trained various classifiers on a publicly accessible dataset to identify IoT devices in different scenarios, including the identification of known and unknown IoT devices, achieving over 99% overall average detection accuracy.