Behavior of a malware varies with respect to malware types. Therefore,knowing type of a malware affects strategies of system protection softwares. Many malware type classification models empowered by machine and deep learning achieve superior accuracies to predict malware types.Machine learning based models need to do heavy feature engineering and feature engineering is dominantly effecting performance of models.On the other hand, deep learning based models require less feature engineering than machine learning based models. However, traditional deep learning architectures and components cause very complex and data sensitive models. Capsule network architecture minimizes this complexity and data sensitivity unlike classical convolutional neural network architectures. This paper proposes an ensemble capsule network model based on bootstrap aggregating technique. The proposed method are tested on two malware datasets, whose the-state-of-the-art results are well-known.
Motivated by the transformative impact of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various domains, researchers and anti-virus vendors have proposed DNNs for malware detection from raw bytes that do not require manual feature engineering. In this work, we propose an attack that interweaves binary-diversification techniques and optimization frameworks to mislead such DNNs while preserving the functionality of binaries. Unlike prior attacks, ours manipulates instructions that are a functional part of the binary, which makes it particularly challenging to defend against. We evaluated our attack against three DNNs in white- and black-box settings, and found that it often achieved success rates near 100%. Moreover, we found that our attack can fool some commercial anti-viruses, in certain cases with a success rate of 85%. We explored several defenses, both new and old, and identified some that can foil over 80% of our evasion attempts. However, these defenses may still be susceptible to evasion by attacks, and so we advocate for augmenting malware-detection systems with methods that do not rely on machine learning.
The ubiquitous availability of wearable sensors is responsible for driving the Internet-of-Things but is also making an impact on sport sciences and precision medicine. While human activity recognition from smartphone data or other types of inertial measurement units (IMU) has evolved to one of the most prominent daily life examples of machine learning, the underlying process of time-series feature engineering still seems to be time-consuming. This lengthy process inhibits the development of IMU-based machine learning applications in sport science and precision medicine. This contribution discusses a feature engineering workflow, which automates the extraction of time-series feature on based on the FRESH algorithm (FeatuRe Extraction based on Scalable Hypothesis tests) to identify statistically significant features from synchronized IMU sensors (IMeasureU Ltd, NZ). The feature engineering workflow has five main steps: time-series engineering, automated time-series feature extraction, optimized feature extraction, fitting of a specialized classifier, and deployment of optimized machine learning pipeline. The workflow is discussed for the case of a user-specific running-walking classification, and the generalization to a multi-user multi-activity classification is demonstrated.
In both mobile and web applications, speeding up user interface response times can often lead to significant improvements in user engagement. A common technique to improve responsiveness is to precompute data ahead of time for specific activities. However, simply precomputing data for all user and activity combinations is prohibitive at scale due to both network constraints and server-side computational costs. It is therefore important to accurately predict per-user application usage in order to minimize wasted precomputation ("predictive precompute"). In this paper, we describe the novel application of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for predictive precompute. We compare their performance with traditional machine learning models, and share findings from their large-scale production use at Facebook. We demonstrate that RNN models improve prediction accuracy, eliminate most feature engineering steps, and reduce the computational cost of serving predictions by an order of magnitude.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now automate the algorithm selection, feature engineering, and hyperparameter tuning steps in a machine learning workflow. Commonly known as AutoML or AutoAI, these technologies aim to relieve data scientists from the tedious manual work. However, today's AutoAI systems often present only limited to no information about the process of how they select and generate model results. Thus, users often do not understand the process, neither do they trust the outputs. In this short paper, we provide a first user evaluation by 10 data scientists of an experimental system, AutoAIViz, that aims to visualize AutoAI's model generation process. We find that the proposed system helps users to complete the data science tasks, and increases their understanding, toward the goal of increasing trust in the AutoAI system.
The intensive care units (ICUs) are responsible for generating a wealth of useful data in the form of Electronic Health Record (EHR). This data allows for the development of a prediction tool with perfect knowledge backing. We aimed to build a mortality prediction model on 2012 Physionet Challenge mortality prediction database of 4000 patients admitted in ICU. The challenges in the dataset, such as high dimensionality, imbalanced distribution, and missing values were tackled with analytical methods and tools via feature engineering and new variable construction. The objective of the research is to utilize the relations among the clinical variables and construct new variables which would establish the effectiveness of 1-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1- D CNN) with constructed features. Its performance with the traditional machine learning algorithms like XGBoost classifier, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Neighbours Classifier (K-NN), and Random Forest Classifier (RF) is compared for Area Under Curve (AUC). The investigation reveals the best AUC of 0.848 using 1-D CNN model.
In this article, we focus on the analysis of the potential factors driving the spread of influenza, and possible policies to mitigate the adverse effects of the disease. To be precise, we first invoke discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to conclude a yearly periodic regional structure in the influenza activity, thus safely restricting ourselves to the analysis of the yearly influenza behavior. Then we collect a massive number of possible region-wise indicators contributing to the influenza mortality, such as consumption, immunization, sanitation, water quality, and other indicators from external data, with $1170$ dimensions in total. We extract significant features from the high dimensional indicators using a combination of data analysis techniques, including matrix completion, support vector machines (SVM), autoencoders, and principal component analysis (PCA). Furthermore, we model the international flow of migration and trade as a convolution on regional influenza activity, and solve the deconvolution problem as higher-order perturbations to the linear regression, thus separating regional and international factors related to the influenza mortality. Finally, both the original model and the perturbed model are tested on regional examples, as validations of our models. Pertaining to the policy, we make a proposal based on the connectivity data along with the previously extracted significant features to alleviate the impact of influenza, as well as efficiently propagate and carry out the policies. We conclude that environmental features and economic features are of significance to the influenza mortality. The model can be easily adapted to model other types of infectious diseases.
Unsupervised anomaly detection from high dimensional data like mobility networks is a challenging task. Study of different approaches of feature engineering from such high dimensional data have been a focus of research in this field. This study aims to investigate the transferability of features learned by network classification to unsupervised anomaly detection. We propose use of an auxiliary classification task to extract features from unlabelled data by supervised learning, which can be used for unsupervised anomaly detection. We validate this approach by designing experiments to detect anomalies in mobility network data from New York and Taipei, and compare the results to traditional unsupervised feature learning approaches of PCA and autoencoders. We find that our feature learning approach yields best anomaly detection performance for both datasets, outperforming other studied approaches. This establishes the utility of this approach to feature engineering, which can be applied to other problems of similar nature.
Information extraction (IE) aims to produce structured information from an input text, e.g., Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction. Various attempts have been proposed for IE via feature engineering or deep learning. However, most of them fail to associate the complex relationships inherent in the task itself, which has proven to be especially crucial. For example, the relation between 2 entities is highly dependent on their entity types. These dependencies can be regarded as complex constraints that can be efficiently expressed as logical rules. To combine such logic reasoning capabilities with learning capabilities of deep neural networks, we propose to integrate logical knowledge in the form of first-order logic into a deep learning system, which can be trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. The integrated framework is able to enhance neural outputs with knowledge regularization via logic rules, and at the same time update the weights of logic rules to comply with the characteristics of the training data. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed model on multiple IE tasks.
Mental disorders such as depression and anxiety have been increasing at alarming rates in the worldwide population. Notably, the major depressive disorder has become a common problem among higher education students, aggravated, and maybe even occasioned, by the academic pressures they must face. While the reasons for this alarming situation remain unclear (although widely investigated), the student already facing this problem must receive treatment. To that, it is first necessary to screen the symptoms. The traditional way for that is relying on clinical consultations or answering questionnaires. However, nowadays, the data shared at social media is a ubiquitous source that can be used to detect the depression symptoms even when the student is not able to afford or search for professional care. Previous works have already relied on social media data to detect depression on the general population, usually focusing on either posted images or texts or relying on metadata. In this work, we focus on detecting the severity of the depression symptoms in higher education students, by comparing deep learning to feature engineering models induced from both the pictures and their captions posted on Instagram. The experimental results show that students presenting a BDI score higher or equal than 20 can be detected with 0.92 of recall and 0.69 of precision in the best case, reached by a fusion model. Our findings show the potential of large-scale depression screening, which could shed light upon students at-risk.
The cornerstone of computational drug design is the calculation of binding affinity between two biological counterparts, especially a chemical compound, i.e., a ligand, and a protein. Predicting the strength of protein-ligand binding with reasonable accuracy is critical for drug discovery. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework named DeepAtom to accurately predict the protein-ligand binding affinity. With 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) architecture, DeepAtom could automatically extract binding related atomic interaction patterns from the voxelized complex structure. Compared with the other CNN based approaches, our light-weight model design effectively improves the model representational capacity, even with the limited available training data. With validation experiments on the PDBbind v.2016 benchmark and the independent Astex Diverse Set, we demonstrate that the less feature engineering dependent DeepAtom approach consistently outperforms the other state-of-the-art scoring methods. We also compile and propose a new benchmark dataset to further improve the model performances. With the new dataset as training input, DeepAtom achieves Pearson's R=0.83 and RMSE=1.23 pK units on the PDBbind v.2016 core set. The promising results demonstrate that DeepAtom models can be potentially adopted in computational drug development protocols such as molecular docking and virtual screening.
The research in myoelectric control systems primarily focuses on extracting discriminative representations from the electromyographic (EMG) signal by designing handcrafted features. Recently, deep learning techniques have been applied to the challenging task of EMG-based gesture recognition. The adoption of these techniques slowly shifts the focus from feature engineering to feature learning. However, the black-box nature of deep learning makes it hard to understand the type of information learned by the network and how it relates to handcrafted features. Additionally, due to the high variability in EMG recordings between participants, deep features tend to generalize poorly across subjects using standard training methods. Consequently, this work introduces a new multi-domain learning algorithm, named ADANN, which significantly enhances (p=0.00004) inter-subject classification accuracy by an average of 19.40% compared to standard training. Using ADANN-generated features, the main contribution of this work is to provide the first topological data analysis of EMG-based gesture recognition for the characterisation of the information encoded within a deep network, using handcrafted features as landmarks. This analysis reveals that handcrafted features and the learned features (in the earlier layers) both try to discriminate between all gestures, but do not encode the same information to do so. Furthermore, using convolutional network visualization techniques reveal that learned features tend to ignore the most activated channel during gesture contraction, which is in stark contrast with the prevalence of handcrafted features designed to capture amplitude information. Overall, this work paves the way for hybrid feature sets by providing a clear guideline of complementary information encoded within learned and handcrafted features.
This paper considers online convex optimization (OCO) problems - the paramount framework for online learning algorithm design. The loss function of learning task in OCO setting is based on streaming data so that OCO is a powerful tool to model large scale applications such as online recommender systems. Meanwhile, real-world data are usually of extreme high-dimensional due to modern feature engineering techniques so that the quadratic regression is impractical. Factorization Machine as well as its variants are efficient models for capturing feature interactions with low-rank matrix model but they can't fulfill the OCO setting due to their non-convexity. In this paper, We propose a projective quadratic regression (PQR) model. First, it can capture the import second-order feature information. Second, it is a convex model, so the requirements of OCO are fulfilled and the global optimal solution can be achieved. Moreover, existing modern online optimization methods such as Online Gradient Descent (OGD) or Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) can be applied directly. In addition, by choosing a proper hyper-parameter, we show that it has the same order of space and time complexity as the linear model and thus can handle high-dimensional data. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed PQR model in terms of accuracy and efficiency by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.
We present a novel Cross-Class Relevance Learning approach for the task of temporal concept localization. Most localization architectures rely on feature extraction layers followed by a classification layer which outputs class probabilities for each segment. However, in many real-world applications classes can exhibit complex relationships that are difficult to model with this architecture. In contrast, we propose to incorporate target class and class-related features as input, and learn a pairwise binary model to predict general segment to class relevance. This facilitates learning of shared information between classes, and allows for arbitrary class-specific feature engineering. We apply this approach to the 3rd YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge together with other leading models, and achieve first place out of over 280 teams. In this paper we describe our approach and show some empirical results.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown good performance in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification due to the automation of feature engineering. Excellent hand-crafted architectures of CNNs incorporated the wisdom of human experts, which is an important reason for CNN's success. However, the design of the architectures is a difficult problem, which needs a lot of professional knowledge as well as computational resources. Moreover, the architecture designed by hand might be suboptimal, because it is only one of thousands of unobserved but objective existed paths. Considering that the success of deep learning is largely due to its automation of the feature engineering process, how to design automatic architecture searching methods to replace the hand-crafted ones is an interesting topic. In this paper, we explore the application of neural architecture search (NAS) in PolSAR area for the first time. Different from the utilization of existing NAS methods, we propose a differentiable architecture search (DAS) method which is customized for PolSAR classification. The proposed DAS is equipped with a PolSAR tailored search space and an improved one-shot search strategy. By DAS, the weights parameters and architecture parameters (corresponds to the hyperparameters but not the topologies) can be optimized by stochastic gradient descent method during the training. The optimized architecture parameters should be transformed into corresponding CNN architecture and re-train to achieve high-precision PolSAR classification. In addition, complex-valued DAS is developed to take into account the characteristics of PolSAR images so as to further improve the performance. Experiments on three PolSAR benchmark datasets show that the CNNs obtained by searching have better classification performance than the hand-crafted ones.
Convective storms are one of the severe weather hazards found during the warm season. Doppler weather radar is the only operational instrument that can frequently sample the detailed structure of convective storm which has a small spatial scale and short lifetime. For the challenging task of short-term convective storm forecasting, 3-D radar images contain information about the processes in convective storm. However, effectively extracting such information from multisource raw data has been problematic due to a lack of methodology and computation limitations. Recent advancements in deep learning techniques and graphics processing units now make it possible. This article investigates the feasibility and performance of an end-to-end deep learning nowcasting method. The nowcasting problem was transformed into a classification problem first, and then, a deep learning method that uses a convolutional neural network was presented to make predictions. On the first layer of CNN, a cross-channel 3D convolution was proposed to fuse 3D raw data. The CNN method eliminates the handcrafted feature engineering, i.e., the process of using domain knowledge of the data to manually design features. Operationally produced historical data of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in China was used to train the nowcasting system and evaluate its performance; 3737332 samples were collected in the training data set. The experimental results show that the deep learning method improves nowcasting skills compared with traditional machine learning methods.
Predicting the runtime complexity of a programming code is an arduous task. In fact, even for humans, it requires a subtle analysis and comprehensive knowledge of algorithms to predict time complexity with high fidelity, given any code. As per Turing's Halting problem proof, estimating code complexity is mathematically impossible. Nevertheless, an approximate solution to such a task can help developers to get real-time feedback for the efficiency of their code. In this work, we model this problem as a machine learning task and check its feasibility with thorough analysis. Due to the lack of any open source dataset for this task, we propose our own annotated dataset CoRCoD: Code Runtime Complexity Dataset, extracted from online judges. We establish baselines using two different approaches: feature engineering and code embeddings, to achieve state of the art results and compare their performances. Such solutions can be widely useful in potential applications like automatically grading coding assignments, IDE-integrated tools for static code analysis, and others.
Suicide is a critical issue in modern society. Early detection and prevention of suicide attempts should be addressed to save people's life. Current suicidal ideation detection methods include clinical methods based on the interaction between social workers or experts and the targeted individuals and machine learning techniques with feature engineering or deep learning for automatic detection based on online social contents. This paper is the first survey that comprehensively introduces and discusses the methods from these categories. Domain-specific applications of suicidal ideation detection are reviewed according to their data sources, i.e., questionnaires, electronic health records, suicide notes, and online user content. Several specific tasks and datasets are introduced and summarized to facilitate further research. Finally, we summarize the limitations of current work and provide an outlook of further research directions.
The rising growth of fake news and misleading information through online media outlets demands an automatic method for detecting such news articles. Of the few limited works which differentiate between trusted vs other types of news article (satire, propaganda, hoax), none of them model sentence interactions within a document. We observe an interesting pattern in the way sentences interact with each other across different kind of news articles. To capture this kind of information for long news articles, we propose a graph neural network-based model which does away with the need of feature engineering for fine grained fake news classification. Through experiments, we show that our proposed method beats strong neural baselines and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing datasets. Moreover, we establish the generalizability of our model by evaluating its performance in out-of-domain scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/MysteryVaibhav/fake_news_semantics
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key component in NLP systems for question answering, information retrieval, relation extraction, etc. NER systems have been studied and developed widely for decades, but accurate systems using deep neural networks (NN) have only been introduced in the last few years. We present a comprehensive survey of deep neural network architectures for NER, and contrast them with previous approaches to NER based on feature engineering and other supervised or semi-supervised learning algorithms. Our results highlight the improvements achieved by neural networks, and show how incorporating some of the lessons learned from past work on feature-based NER systems can yield further improvements.