23,957 research outputs found
PMLB: A Large Benchmark Suite for Machine Learning Evaluation and Comparison
The selection, development, or comparison of machine learning methods in data
mining can be a difficult task based on the target problem and goals of a
particular study. Numerous publicly available real-world and simulated
benchmark datasets have emerged from different sources, but their organization
and adoption as standards have been inconsistent. As such, selecting and
curating specific benchmarks remains an unnecessary burden on machine learning
practitioners and data scientists. The present study introduces an accessible,
curated, and developing public benchmark resource to facilitate identification
of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning methodologies. We
compare meta-features among the current set of benchmark datasets in this
resource to characterize the diversity of available data. Finally, we apply a
number of established machine learning methods to the entire benchmark suite
and analyze how datasets and algorithms cluster in terms of performance. This
work is an important first step towards understanding the limitations of
popular benchmarking suites and developing a resource that connects existing
benchmarking standards to more diverse and efficient standards in the future.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, submitted for review to JML
Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)
The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017
POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths
Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to
spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam
include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of
these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these
defenses.
Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share
common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users
within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content
shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of
people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar
messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious
content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns.
In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that
leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages
on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our
system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that
our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91%
precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more
comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art
spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the
past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through
simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam
messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine
learning attacks
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