Place Categorization and Semantic Mapping on a Mobile Robot

In this paper we focus on the challenging problem of place categorization and semantic mapping on a robot without environment-specific training. Motivated by their ongoing success in various visual recognition tasks, we build our system upon a state-of-the-art convolutional network. We overcome its closed-set limitations by complementing the network with a series of one-vs-all classifiers that can learn to recognize new semantic classes online. Prior domain knowledge is incorporated by embedding the classification system into a Bayesian filter framework that also ensures temporal coherence. We evaluate the classification accuracy of the system on a robot that maps a variety of places on our campus in real-time. We show how semantic information can boost robotic object detection performance and how the semantic map can be used to modulate the robot's behaviour during navigation tasks. The system is made available to the community as a ROS module

A Comprehensive Survey of Data Mining-based Fraud Detection Research

This survey paper categorises, compares, and summarises from almost all published technical and review articles in automated fraud detection within the last 10 years. It defines the professional fraudster, formalises the main types and subtypes of known fraud, and presents the nature of data evidence collected within affected industries. Within the business context of mining the data to achieve higher cost savings, this research presents methods and techniques together with their problems. Compared to all related reviews on fraud detection, this survey covers much more technical articles and is the only one, to the best of our knowledge, which proposes alternative data and solutions from related domains.Comment: 14 page

Machine learning approaches for early DRG classification and resource allocation

Recent research has highlighted the need for upstream planning in healthcare service delivery systems, patient scheduling, and resource allocation in the hospital inpatient setting. This study examines the value of upstream planning within hospital-wide resource allocation decisions based on machine learning (ML) and mixed-integer programming (MIP), focusing on prediction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) and the use of these predictions for allocating scarce hospital resources. DRGs are a payment scheme employed at patients’ discharge, where the DRG and length of stay determine the revenue that the hospital obtains. We show that early and accurate DRG classification using ML methods, incorporated into an MIP-based resource allocation model, can increase the hospital’s contribution margin, the number of admitted patients, and the utilization of resources such as operating rooms and beds. We test these methods on hospital data containing more than 16,000 inpatient records and demonstrate improved DRG classification accuracy as compared to the hospital’s current approach. The largest improvements were observed at and before admission, when information such as procedures and diagnoses is typically incomplete, but performance was improved even after a substantial portion of the patient’s length of stay, and under multiple scenarios making different assumptions about the available information. Using the improved DRG predictions within our resource allocation model improves contribution margin by 2.9% and the utilization of scarce resources such as operating rooms and beds from 66.3% to 67.3% and from 70.7% to 71.7%, respectively. This enables 9.0% more nonurgent elective patients to be admitted as compared to the baseline

Improving Image Classification with Location Context

With the widespread availability of cellphones and cameras that have GPS capabilities, it is common for images being uploaded to the Internet today to have GPS coordinates associated with them. In addition to research that tries to predict GPS coordinates from visual features, this also opens up the door to problems that are conditioned on the availability of GPS coordinates. In this work, we tackle the problem of performing image classification with location context, in which we are given the GPS coordinates for images in both the train and test phases. We explore different ways of encoding and extracting features from the GPS coordinates, and show how to naturally incorporate these features into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the current state-of-the-art for most image classification and recognition problems. We also show how it is possible to simultaneously learn the optimal pooling radii for a subset of our features within the CNN framework. To evaluate our model and to help promote research in this area, we identify a set of location-sensitive concepts and annotate a subset of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100M dataset that has GPS coordinates with these concepts, which we make publicly available. By leveraging location context, we are able to achieve almost a 7% gain in mean average precision

Intrusion detection using probabilistic graphical models

Modern computer systems are plagued by security vulnerabilities and flaws on many levels. Those vulnerabilities and flaws are discovered and exploited by attackers for their various intrusion purposes, such as eavesdropping, data modification, identity spoofing, password based attack, and denial of service attack, etc. The security of our computer systems and data is always at risk because of the open society of the internet. Due to the rapid growth of the internet applications, intrusion detection and prevention have become increasingly important research topics, in order to protect networking systems, such as the Web servers, database servers, cloud servers and so on, from threats. In this thesis, we attempt to build more efficient Intrusion Detection System through three different approaches, from different perspectives and based on different situations. Firstly, we propose Bayesian Model Averaging of Bayesian Network (BNMA) Classifiers for intrusion detection. In this work, we compare our BNMA classifier with Bayesian Network classifier and Naive Bayes classifier, which were shown be good models for detecting intrusion with reasonable accuracy and efficiency in the literature. From the experiment results, we see that BNMA can be more efficient and reliable than its competitors, i.e., the Bayesian network classifier and Naive Bayesian Network classifier, for all different sizes of training dataset. The advantage of BNMA is more pronounced when the training dataset size is small. Secondly, we introduce the Situational Data Model as a method for collecting dataset to train intrusion detection models. Unlike previously discussed static features as in the KDD CUP 99 data, which were collected without time stamps, Situational Data are collected in chronological sequence. Therefore, they can capture not only the dependency relationships among different features, but also relationships of values collected over time for the same features. The experiment results show that the intrusion detection model trained by Situational Dataset outperforms that trained by action-only sequences. Thirdly, we introduce the Situation Aware with Conditional Random Fields Intrusion Detection System (SA-CRF-IDS). The SA-CRF-IDS is trained by probabilistic graphical model Conditional Random Fields (CRF) over the Situational Dataset. The experiment results show that the CRF outperforms HMM with significantly better detection accuracy, and better ROC curve when we run the experiment on the non-Situational dataset. On the other hand, the two training methods have very similar performance when the Situational Dataset is adopted