Optimized and Automated Machine Learning Techniques Towards IoT Data Analytics and Cybersecurity

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems have emerged as a prevalent technology in our daily lives. With the wide spread of sensors and smart devices in recent years, the data generation volume and speed of IoT systems have increased dramatically. In most IoT systems, massive volumes of data must be processed, transformed, and analyzed on a frequent basis to enable various IoT services and functionalities. Machine Learning (ML) approaches have shown their capacity for IoT data analytics. However, applying ML models to IoT data analytics tasks still faces many difficulties and challenges. The first challenge is to process large amounts of dynamic IoT data to make accurate and informed decisions. The second challenge is to automate and optimize the data analytics process. The third challenge is to protect IoT devices and systems against various cyber threats and attacks. To address the IoT data analytics challenges, this thesis proposes various ML-based frameworks and data analytics approaches in several applications. Specifically, the first part of the thesis provides a comprehensive review of applying Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) techniques to IoT data analytics tasks. It discusses all procedures of the general ML pipeline. The second part of the thesis proposes several supervised ML-based novel Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) to improve the security of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems and connected vehicles. Optimization techniques are used to obtain optimized ML models with high attack detection accuracy. The third part of the thesis developed unsupervised ML algorithms to identify network anomalies and malicious network entities (e.g., attacker IPs, compromised machines, and polluted files/content) to protect Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) from service targeting attacks, including distributed denial of service and cache pollution attacks. The proposed framework is evaluated on real-world CDN access log data to illustrate its effectiveness. The fourth part of the thesis proposes adaptive online learning algorithms for addressing concept drift issues (i.e., data distribution changes) and effectively handling dynamic IoT data streams in order to provide reliable IoT services. The development of drift adaptive learning methods can effectively adapt to data distribution changes and avoid data analytics model performance degradation