Cross-situational and supervised learning in the emergence of communication

Scenarios for the emergence or bootstrap of a lexicon involve the repeated interaction between at least two agents who must reach a consensus on how to name N objects using H words. Here we consider minimal models of two types of learning algorithms: cross-situational learning, in which the individuals determine the meaning of a word by looking for something in common across all observed uses of that word, and supervised operant conditioning learning, in which there is strong feedback between individuals about the intended meaning of the words. Despite the stark differences between these learning schemes, we show that they yield the same communication accuracy in the limits of large N and H, which coincides with the result of the classical occupancy problem of randomly assigning N objects to H words.

Applying both positive and negative selection to supervised learning for anomaly detection

This paper presents a novel approach of applying both positive selection and negative selection to supervised learning for anomaly detection. It first learns the patterns of the normal class via co-evolutionary genetic algorithm, which is inspired from the positive selection, and then generates synthetic samples of the anomaly class, which is based on the negative selection in the immune system. Two algorithms about synthetic generation of the anomaly class are proposed. One deals with data sets containing a few anomalous samples; while the other deals with data sets containing no anomalous samples at all. The experimental results on some benchmark data sets from UCI data set repertory show that the detection rate is improved evidently, accompanied by a slight increase in false alarm rate via introducing novel synthetic samples of the anomaly class. The advantages of our method are the increased ability of classifiers in identifying both previously known and innovative anomalies, and the maximal degradation of overfitting phenomenon.

A comparative study of supervised learning techniques for data-driven haptic simulation

This paper focuses on the choice of a supervised learning algorithm and possible data preprocessing in the domain of data-driven haptic simulation. This is done through a comparison of the performance of different supervised learning techniques with and without data preprocessing. The simulation of haptic interactions with deformable objects using data-driven methods has emerged as an alternative to parametric methods. The accuracy of the simulation depends on the empirical data and the learning method. Several methods were suggested in the literature and here we provide a comparison between their performance and applicability to this domain. We selected four examples to be compared: singular learning mechanism which is artificial neural networks (ANN), attribute selection followed by ANN learning process, ensemble of multiple learning techniques, and attribute selection followed by the learning ensemble. These methods performance was compared in the domain of simulating multiple interactions with a deformable object with nonlinear material behavior.

Zero-day malware detection based on supervised learning algorithms of API call signatures

Zero-day or unknown malware are created using code obfuscation techniques that can modify the parent code to produce offspring copies which have the same functionality but with different signatures. Current techniques reported in literature lack the capability of detecting zero-day malware with the required accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we have proposed and evaluated a novel method of employing several data mining techniques to detect and classify zero-day malware with high levels of accuracy and efficiency based on the frequency of Windows API calls. This paper describes the methodology employed for the collection of large data sets to train the classifiers, and analyses the performance results of the various data mining algorithms adopted for the study using a fully automated tool developed in this research to conduct the various experimental investigations and evaluation. Through the performance results of these algorithms from our experimental analysis, we are able to evaluate and discuss the advantages of one data mining algorithm over the other for accurately detecting zero-day malware successfully. The data mining framework employed in this research learns through analysing the behavior of existing malicious and benign codes in large datasets. We have employed robust classifiers, namely Naïve Bayes (NB) Algorithm, k−Nearest Neighbor (kNN) Algorithm, Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) Algorithm with 4 differents kernels (SMO - Normalized PolyKernel, SMO – PolyKernel, SMO – Puk, and SMO- Radial Basis Function (RBF)), Backpropagation Neural Networks Algorithm, and J48 decision tree and have evaluated their performance. Overall, the automated data mining system implemented for this study has achieved high true positive (TP) rate of more than 98.5%, and low false positive (FP) rate of less than 0.025, which has not been achieved in literature so far. This is much higher than the required commercial acceptance level indicating that our novel technique is a major leap forward in detecting zero-day malware. This paper also offers future directions for researchers in exploring different aspects of obfuscations that are affecting the IT world today.

Evaluation of four supervised learning methods for benthic habitat mapping using backscatter from multi-beam sonar

An understanding of the distribution and extent of marine habitats is essential for the implementation of ecosystem-based management strategies. Historically this had been difficult in marine environments until the advancement of acoustic sensors. This study demonstrates the applicability of supervised learning techniques for benthic habitat characterization using angular backscatter response data. With the advancement of multibeam echo-sounder (MBES) technology, full coverage datasets of physical structure over vast regions of the seafloor are now achievable. Supervised learning methods typically applied to terrestrial remote sensing provide a cost-effective approach for habitat characterization in marine systems. However the comparison of the relative performance of different classifiers using acoustic data is limited. Characterization of acoustic backscatter data from MBES using four different supervised learning methods to generate benthic habitat maps is presented. Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC), Quick, Unbiased, Efficient Statistical Tree (QUEST), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were evaluated to classify angular backscatter response into habitat classes using training data acquired from underwater video observations. Results for biota classifications indicated that SVM and RF produced the highest accuracies, followed by QUEST and MLC, respectively. The most important backscatter data were from the moderate incidence angles between 30° and 50°. This study presents initial results for understanding how acoustic backscatter from MBES can be optimized for the characterization of marine benthic biological habitats. © 2012 by the authors.

Towards designing an email classification system using multi-view based semi-supervised learning

The goal of email classification is to classify user emails into spam and legitimate ones. Many supervised learning algorithms have been invented in this domain to accomplish the task, and these algorithms require a large number of labeled training data. However, data labeling is a labor intensive task and requires in-depth domain knowledge. Thus, only a very small proportion of the data can be labeled in practice. This bottleneck greatly degrades the effectiveness of supervised email classification systems. In order to address this problem, in this work, we first identify some critical issues regarding supervised machine learning-based email classification. Then we propose an effective classification model based on multi-view disagreement-based semi-supervised learning. The motivation behind the attempt of using multi-view and semi-supervised learning is that multi-view can provide richer information for classification, which is often ignored by literature, and semi-supervised learning supplies with the capability of coping with labeled and unlabeled data. In the evaluation, we demonstrate that the multi-view data can improve the email classification than using a single view data, and that the proposed model working with our algorithm can achieve better performance as compared to the existing similar algorithms.

Supervised learning for labelling human body with attached props

 In this research, a novel method for generating training data of human postures with attached objects is proposed. The results has shown a significant increase in body-part classification accuracy for subjects with props from 60% to 94% using the generated image set

Particle Competition and Cooperation in Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Particle Competition and Cooperation in Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning with Concept Drift

Concept drift is a problem of increasing importance in machine learning and data mining. Data sets under analysis are no longer only static databases, but also data streams in which concepts and data distributions may not be stable over time. However, most learning algorithms produced so far are based on the assumption that data comes from a fixed distribution, so they are not suitable to handle concept drifts. Moreover, some concept drifts applications requires fast response, which means an algorithm must always be (re) trained with the latest available data. But the process of labeling data is usually expensive and/or time consuming when compared to unlabeled data acquisition, thus only a small fraction of the incoming data may be effectively labeled. Semi-supervised learning methods may help in this scenario, as they use both labeled and unlabeled data in the training process. However, most of them are also based on the assumption that the data is static. Therefore, semi-supervised learning with concept drifts is still an open challenge in machine learning. Recently, a particle competition and cooperation approach was used to realize graph-based semi-supervised learning from static data. In this paper, we extend that approach to handle data streams and concept drift. The result is a passive algorithm using a single classifier, which naturally adapts to concept changes, without any explicit drift detection mechanism. Its built-in mechanisms provide a natural way of learning from new data, gradually forgetting older knowledge as older labeled data items became less influent on the classification of newer data items. Some computer simulation are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Particle competition and cooperation to prevent error propagation from mislabeled data in semi-supervised learning

Semi-supervised learning is applied to classification problems where only a small portion of the data items is labeled. In these cases, the reliability of the labels is a crucial factor, because mislabeled items may propagate wrong labels to a large portion or even the entire data set. This paper aims to address this problem by presenting a graph-based (network-based) semi-supervised learning method, specifically designed to handle data sets with mislabeled samples. The method uses teams of walking particles, with competitive and cooperative behavior, for label propagation in the network constructed from the input data set. The proposed model is nature-inspired and it incorporates some features to make it robust to a considerable amount of mislabeled data items. Computer simulations show the performance of the method in the presence of different percentage of mislabeled data, in networks of different sizes and average node degree. Importantly, these simulations reveals the existence of the critical points of the mislabeled subset size, below which the network is free of wrong label contamination, but above which the mislabeled samples start to propagate their labels to the rest of the network. Moreover, numerical comparisons have been made among the proposed method and other representative graph-based semi-supervised learning methods using both artificial and real-world data sets. Interestingly, the proposed method has increasing better performance than the others as the percentage of mislabeled samples is getting larger. © 2012 IEEE.

Combined active and semi-supervised learning using particle walking temporal dynamicscombined active and semi-supervised learning using particle walking temporal dynamics

Both Semi-Supervised Leaning and Active Learning are techniques used when unlabeled data is abundant, but the process of labeling them is expensive and/or time consuming. In this paper, those two machine learning techniques are combined into a single nature-inspired method. It features particles walking on a network built from the data set, using a unique random-greedy rule to select neighbors to visit. The particles, which have both competitive and cooperative behavior, are created on the network as the result of label queries. They may be created as the algorithm executes and only nodes affected by the new particles have to be updated. Therefore, it saves execution time compared to traditional active learning frameworks, in which the learning algorithm has to be executed several times. The data items to be queried are select based on information extracted from the nodes and particles temporal dynamics. Two different rules for queries are explored in this paper, one of them is based on querying by uncertainty approaches and the other is based on data and labeled nodes distribution. Each of them may perform better than the other according to some data sets peculiarities. Experimental results on some real-world data sets are provided, and the proposed method outperforms the semi-supervised learning method, from which it is derived, in all of them.