40,834 research outputs found
A Confidence-Based Approach for Balancing Fairness and Accuracy
We study three classical machine learning algorithms in the context of
algorithmic fairness: adaptive boosting, support vector machines, and logistic
regression. Our goal is to maintain the high accuracy of these learning
algorithms while reducing the degree to which they discriminate against
individuals because of their membership in a protected group.
Our first contribution is a method for achieving fairness by shifting the
decision boundary for the protected group. The method is based on the theory of
margins for boosting. Our method performs comparably to or outperforms previous
algorithms in the fairness literature in terms of accuracy and low
discrimination, while simultaneously allowing for a fast and transparent
quantification of the trade-off between bias and error.
Our second contribution addresses the shortcomings of the bias-error
trade-off studied in most of the algorithmic fairness literature. We
demonstrate that even hopelessly naive modifications of a biased algorithm,
which cannot be reasonably said to be fair, can still achieve low bias and high
accuracy. To help to distinguish between these naive algorithms and more
sensible algorithms we propose a new measure of fairness, called resilience to
random bias (RRB). We demonstrate that RRB distinguishes well between our naive
and sensible fairness algorithms. RRB together with bias and accuracy provides
a more complete picture of the fairness of an algorithm
Mal-Netminer: Malware Classification Approach based on Social Network Analysis of System Call Graph
As the security landscape evolves over time, where thousands of species of
malicious codes are seen every day, antivirus vendors strive to detect and
classify malware families for efficient and effective responses against malware
campaigns. To enrich this effort, and by capitalizing on ideas from the social
network analysis domain, we build a tool that can help classify malware
families using features driven from the graph structure of their system calls.
To achieve that, we first construct a system call graph that consists of system
calls found in the execution of the individual malware families. To explore
distinguishing features of various malware species, we study social network
properties as applied to the call graph, including the degree distribution,
degree centrality, average distance, clustering coefficient, network density,
and component ratio. We utilize features driven from those properties to build
a classifier for malware families. Our experimental results show that
influence-based graph metrics such as the degree centrality are effective for
classifying malware, whereas the general structural metrics of malware are less
effective for classifying malware. Our experiments demonstrate that the
proposed system performs well in detecting and classifying malware families
within each malware class with accuracy greater than 96%.Comment: Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Vol 201
Ensembles of Randomized Time Series Shapelets Provide Improved Accuracy while Reducing Computational Costs
Shapelets are discriminative time series subsequences that allow generation
of interpretable classification models, which provide faster and generally
better classification than the nearest neighbor approach. However, the shapelet
discovery process requires the evaluation of all possible subsequences of all
time series in the training set, making it extremely computation intensive.
Consequently, shapelet discovery for large time series datasets quickly becomes
intractable. A number of improvements have been proposed to reduce the training
time. These techniques use approximation or discretization and often lead to
reduced classification accuracy compared to the exact method.
We are proposing the use of ensembles of shapelet-based classifiers obtained
using random sampling of the shapelet candidates. Using random sampling reduces
the number of evaluated candidates and consequently the required computational
cost, while the classification accuracy of the resulting models is also not
significantly different than that of the exact algorithm. The combination of
randomized classifiers rectifies the inaccuracies of individual models because
of the diversity of the solutions. Based on the experiments performed, it is
shown that the proposed approach of using an ensemble of inexpensive
classifiers provides better classification accuracy compared to the exact
method at a significantly lesser computational cost
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