Cyber Security

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th China Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2022, held in Beijing, China, in August 2022. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: ​​data security; anomaly detection; cryptocurrency; information security; vulnerabilities; mobile internet; threat intelligence; text recognition

Recent Trends in Computational Intelligence

Traditional models struggle to cope with complexity, noise, and the existence of a changing environment, while Computational Intelligence (CI) offers solutions to complicated problems as well as reverse problems. The main feature of CI is adaptability, spanning the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. CI also comprises biologically-inspired technologies such as the intellect of swarm as part of evolutionary computation and encompassing wider areas such as image processing, data collection, and natural language processing. This book aims to discuss the usage of CI for optimal solving of various applications proving its wide reach and relevance. Bounding of optimization methods and data mining strategies make a strong and reliable prediction tool for handling real-life applications

The Use of Transfer Learning for Activity Recognition in Instances of Heterogeneous Sensing

Transfer learning is a growing field that can address the variability of activity recognition problems by reusing the knowledge from previous experiences to recognise activities from different conditions, resulting in the leveraging of resources such as training and labelling efforts. Although integrating ubiquitous sensing technology and transfer learning seem promising, there are some research opportunities that, if addressed, could accelerate the development of activity recognition. This paper presents TL-FmRADLs; a framework that converges the feature fusion strategy with a teacher/learner approach over the active learning technique to automatise the self-training process of the learner models. Evaluation TL-FmRADLs is conducted over InSync; an open access dataset introduced for the first time in this paper. Results show promising effects towards mitigating the insufficiency of labelled data available by enabling the learner model to outperform the teacher’s performance

Cyber Security

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th China Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2022, held in Beijing, China, in August 2022. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: ​​data security; anomaly detection; cryptocurrency; information security; vulnerabilities; mobile internet; threat intelligence; text recognition

Automatic Stance Detection Using End-to-End Memory Networks

We present a novel end-to-end memory network for stance detection, which jointly (i) predicts whether a document agrees, disagrees, discusses or is unrelated with respect to a given target claim, and also (ii) extracts snippets of evidence for that prediction. The network operates at the paragraph level and integrates convolutional and recurrent neural networks, as well as a similarity matrix as part of the overall architecture. The experimental evaluation on the Fake News Challenge dataset shows state-of-the-art performance.Comment: NAACL-2018; Stance detection; Fact-Checking; Veracity; Memory networks; Neural Networks; Distributed Representation

Modelos de clasificación multi-etiqueta para datos heterogéneos: un enfoque basado en ensembles

In recent years, the multi-label classification task has gained the attention of the scientific community given its ability to solve real-world problems where each instance of the dataset may be associated with several class labels simultaneously. For example, in medical problems each patient may be affected by several diseases at the same time, and in multimedia categorization problems, each item might be related with different tags or topics. Thus, given the nature of these problems, dealing with them as traditional classification problems where just one class label is assigned to each instance, would lead to a lose of information. However, the fact of having more than one label associated with each instance leads to new classification challenges that should be addressed, such as modeling the compound dependencias among labels, the imbalance of the label space, and the high dimensionality of the output space. A large number of methods for multi-label classification has been proposed in the literature, including several ensemble-based methods. Ensemble learning is a technique which is based on combining the outputs of many diverse base models, in order to outperform each of the separate members. In multi-label classification, ensemble methods are those that combine the predictions of several multi-label classifiers, and these methods have shown to outperform simpler multi-label classifiers. Therefore, given its great performance, we focused our research on the study of ensemble-based methods for multi-label classification. The first objective of this dissertation is to perform an thorough review of the state-of-the-art ensembles of multi-label classifiers. Its aim is twofold: I) study different ensembles of multi-label classifiers proposed in the literature, and categorize them according to their characteristics proposing a novel taxonomy; and II) perform an experimental study to find the method or family of methods that performs better depending on the characteristics of the data, as well as provide then some guidelines to select the best method according to the characteristics of a given problem. Since most of the ensemble methods for multi-label classification are based on creating diverse members by randomly selecting instances, input features, or labels, our second and main objective is to propose novel ensemble methods for multi-label classification where the characteristics of the data are taken into account. For this purpose, we first propose an evolutionary algorithm able to build an ensemble of multi-label classifiers, where each of the individuals of the population is an entire ensemble. This approach is able to model the relationships among the labels with a relative low complexity and imbalance of the output space, also considering these characteristics to guide the learning process. Furthermore, it looks for an optimal structure of the ensemble not only considering its predictive performance, but also the number of times that each label appears in it. In this way, all labels are expected to appear a similar number of times in the ensemble, not neglecting any of them regardless of their frequency. Then, we develop a second evolutionary algorithm able to build ensembles of multi-label classifiers, but in this case each individual of the population is a hypothetical member of the ensemble, and not the entire ensemble. The fact of evolving members of the ensemble separately makes the algorithm less computationally complex and able to determine the quality of each member separately. However, a method to select the ensemble members needs to be defined. This process selects those classifiers that are both accurate but also diverse among them to form the ensemble, also controlling that all labels appear a similar number of times in the final ensemble. In all experimental studies, the methods are compared using rigorous experimental setups and statistical tests over many evaluation metrics and reference datasets in multi-label classification. The experiments confirm that the proposed methods obtain significantly better and more consistent performance than the stateof- the-art methods in multi-label classification. Furthermore, the second proposal is proven to be more efficient than the first one, given the use of separate classifiers as individuals.En los últimos años, el paradigma de clasificación multi-etiqueta ha ganado atención en la comunidad científica, dada su habilidad para resolver problemas reales donde cada instancia del conjunto de datos puede estar asociada con varias etiquetas de clase simultáneamente. Por ejemplo, en problemas médicos cada paciente puede estar afectado por varias enfermedades a la vez, o en problemas de categorización multimedia, cada ítem podría estar relacionado con varias etiquetas o temas. Dada la naturaleza de estos problemas, tratarlos como problemas de clasificación tradicional donde cada instancia puede tener asociada únicamente una etiqueta de clase, conllevaría una pérdida de información. Sin embargo, el hecho de tener más de una etiqueta asociada con cada instancia conlleva la aparición de nuevos retos que deben ser abordados, como modelar las dependencias entre etiquetas, el desbalanceo de etiquetas, y la alta dimensionalidad del espacio de salida. En la literatura se han propuesto un gran número de métodos para clasificación multi-etiqueta, incluyendo varios basados en ensembles. El aprendizaje basado en ensembles combina las salidas de varios modelos más simples y diversos entre sí, de cara a conseguir un mejor rendimiento que cada miembro por separado. En clasificación multi-etiqueta, se consideran ensembles aquellos métodos que combinan las predicciones de varios clasificadores multi-etiqueta, y estos métodos han mostrado conseguir un mejor rendimiento que los clasificadores multi-etiqueta sencillos. Por tanto, dado su buen rendimiento, centramos nuestra investigación en el estudio de métodos basados en ensembles para clasificación multi-etiqueta. El primer objetivo de esta tesis el realizar una revisión a fondo del estado del arte en ensembles de clasificadores multi-etiqueta. El objetivo de este estudio es doble: I) estudiar diferentes ensembles de clasificadores multi-etiqueta propuestos en la literatura, y categorizarlos de acuerdo a sus características proponiendo una nueva taxonomía; y II) realizar un estudio experimental para encontrar el método o familia de métodos que obtiene mejores resultados dependiendo de las características de los datos, así como ofrecer posteriormente algunas guías para seleccionar el mejor método de acuerdo a las características de un problema dado. Dado que la mayoría de ensembles para clasificación multi-etiqueta están basados en la creación de miembros diversos seleccionando aleatoriamente instancias, atributos, o etiquetas; nuestro segundo y principal objetivo es proponer nuevos modelos de ensemble para clasificación multi-etiqueta donde se tengan en cuenta las características de los datos. Para ello, primero proponemos un algoritmo evolutivo capaz de generar un ensemble de clasificadores multi-etiqueta, donde cada uno de los individuos de la población es un ensemble completo. Este enfoque es capaz de modelar las relaciones entre etiquetas con una complejidad y desbalanceo de etiquetas relativamente bajos, considerando también estas características para guiar el proceso de aprendizaje. Además, busca una estructura óptima para el ensemble, no solo considerando su capacidad predictiva, pero también teniendo en cuenta el número de veces que aparece cada etiqueta en él. De este modo, se espera que todas las etiquetas aparezcan un número de veces similar en el ensemble, sin despreciar ninguna de ellas independientemente de su frecuencia. Posteriormente, desarrollamos un segundo algoritmo evolutivo capaz de construir ensembles de clasificadores multi-etiqueta, pero donde cada individuo de la población es un hipotético miembro del ensemble, en lugar del ensemble completo. El hecho de evolucionar los miembros del ensemble por separado hace que el algoritmo sea menos complejo y capaz de determinar la calidad de cada miembro por separado. Sin embargo, también es necesario definir un método para seleccionar los miembros que formarán el ensemble. Este proceso selecciona aquellos clasificadores que sean tanto precisos como diversos entre ellos, también controlando que todas las etiquetas aparezcan un número similar de veces en el ensemble final. En todos los estudios experimentales realizados, los métodos han sido comparados utilizando rigurosas configuraciones experimentales y test estadísticos, involucrando varias métricas de evaluación y conjuntos de datos de referencia en clasificación multi-etiqueta. Los experimentos confirman que los métodos propuestos obtienen un rendimiento significativamente mejor y más consistente que los métodos en el estado del arte. Además, se demuestra que el segundo algoritmo propuesto es más eficiente que el primero, dado el uso de individuos representando clasificadores por separado

Multi-label classification models for heterogeneous data: an ensemble-based approach.

In recent years, the multi-label classification gained attention of the scientific community given its ability to solve real-world problems where each instance of the dataset may be associated with several class labels simultaneously, such as multimedia categorization or medical problems. The first objective of this dissertation is to perform a thorough review of the state-of-the-art ensembles of multi-label classifiers (EMLCs). Its aim is twofold: 1) study state-of-the-art ensembles of multi-label classifiers and categorize them proposing a novel taxonomy; and 2) perform an experimental study to give some tips and guidelines to select the method that perform the best according to the characteristics of a given problem. Since most of the EMLCs are based on creating diverse members by randomly selecting instances, input features, or labels, our main objective is to propose novel ensemble methods while considering the characteristics of the data. In this thesis, we propose two evolutionary algorithms to build EMLCs. The first proposal encodes an entire EMLC in each individual, where each member is focused on a small subset of the labels. On the other hand, the second algorithm encodes separate members in each individual, then combining the individuals of the population to build the ensemble. Finally, both methods are demonstrated to be more consistent and perform significantly better than state-of-the-art methods in multi-label classification

COVID-19 detection using chest X-ray images based on Machine learning and Deep learning models: Further evidence from Data Augmentation

In this master's thesis, deep learning and machine learning are applied to chest X-ray images to detect COVID-1

Sensor-based datasets for human activity recognition - a systematic review of literature

The research area of ambient assisted living has led to the development of activity recognition systems (ARS) based on human activity recognition (HAR). These systems improve the quality of life and the health care of the elderly and dependent people. However, before making them available to end users, it is necessary to evaluate their performance in recognizing activities of daily living, using data set benchmarks in experimental scenarios. For that reason, the scientific community has developed and provided a huge amount of data sets for HAR. Therefore, identifying which ones to use in the evaluation process and which techniques are the most appropriate for prediction of HAR in a specific context is not a trivial task and is key to further progress in this area of research. This work presents a systematic review of the literature of the sensor-based data sets used to evaluate ARS. On the one hand, an analysis of different variables taken from indexed publications related to this field was performed. The sources of information are journals, proceedings, and books located in specialized databases. The analyzed variables characterize publications by year, database, type, quartile, country of origin, and destination, using scientometrics, which allowed identification of the data set most used by researchers. On the other hand, the descriptive and functional variables were analyzed for each of the identified data sets: occupation, annotation, approach, segmentation, representation, feature selection, balancing and addition of instances, and classifier used for recognition. This paper provides an analysis of the sensor-based data sets used in HAR to date, identifying the most appropriate dataset to evaluate ARS and the classification techniques that generate better results