Social scientists increasingly criticize the use of machine learning techniques to understand human behavior. Criticisms include: (1) They are atheoretical and hence of limited scientific value; (2) They do not address causality and are hence of limited policy value; and (3) They are uninterpretable and hence of limited generalizability value (outside contexts very narrowly similar to the training dataset). These criticisms, I argue, miss the enormous opportunity offered by ML techniques to fundamentally improve the practice of empirical social science. Yet each criticism does contain a grain of truth and overcoming them will require innovations to existing methodologies. Some of these innovations are being developed today and some are yet to be tackled. I will in this talk sketch (1) what these innovations look like or should look like; (2) why they are needed; and (3) the technical challenges they raise. I will illustrate my points using a set of applications that range from financial markets to social policy problems to computational models of basic psychological processes. This talk describes joint work with Jon Kleinberg and individual projects with Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, Anuj Shah, Chenhao Tan, Mike Yeomans and Tom Zimmerman.
{"title":"Bugbears or legitimate threats?: (social) scientists' criticisms of machine learning?","authors":"S. Mullainathan","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2630818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2630818","url":null,"abstract":"Social scientists increasingly criticize the use of machine learning techniques to understand human behavior. Criticisms include: (1) They are atheoretical and hence of limited scientific value; (2) They do not address causality and are hence of limited policy value; and (3) They are uninterpretable and hence of limited generalizability value (outside contexts very narrowly similar to the training dataset). These criticisms, I argue, miss the enormous opportunity offered by ML techniques to fundamentally improve the practice of empirical social science. Yet each criticism does contain a grain of truth and overcoming them will require innovations to existing methodologies. Some of these innovations are being developed today and some are yet to be tackled. I will in this talk sketch (1) what these innovations look like or should look like; (2) why they are needed; and (3) the technical challenges they raise. I will illustrate my points using a set of applications that range from financial markets to social policy problems to computational models of basic psychological processes. This talk describes joint work with Jon Kleinberg and individual projects with Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, Anuj Shah, Chenhao Tan, Mike Yeomans and Tom Zimmerman.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"71 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89078145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mohamed F. Ghalwash, Vladan Radosavljevic, Z. Obradovic
Early classification of time series is prevalent in many time-sensitive applications such as, but not limited to, early warning of disease outcome and early warning of crisis in stock market. textcolor{black}{ For example,} early diagnosis allows physicians to design appropriate therapeutic strategies at early stages of diseases. However, practical adaptation of early classification of time series requires an easy to understand explanation (interpretability) and a measure of confidence of the prediction results (uncertainty estimates). These two aspects were not jointly addressed in previous time series early classification studies, such that a difficult choice of selecting one of these aspects is required. In this study, we propose a simple and yet effective method to provide uncertainty estimates for an interpretable early classification method. The question we address here is "how to provide estimates of uncertainty in regard to interpretable early prediction." In our extensive evaluation on twenty time series datasets we showed that the proposed method has several advantages over the state-of-the-art method that provides reliability estimates in early classification. Namely, the proposed method is more effective than the state-of-the-art method, is simple to implement, and provides interpretable results.
{"title":"Utilizing temporal patterns for estimating uncertainty in interpretable early decision making","authors":"Mohamed F. Ghalwash, Vladan Radosavljevic, Z. Obradovic","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623694","url":null,"abstract":"Early classification of time series is prevalent in many time-sensitive applications such as, but not limited to, early warning of disease outcome and early warning of crisis in stock market. textcolor{black}{ For example,} early diagnosis allows physicians to design appropriate therapeutic strategies at early stages of diseases. However, practical adaptation of early classification of time series requires an easy to understand explanation (interpretability) and a measure of confidence of the prediction results (uncertainty estimates). These two aspects were not jointly addressed in previous time series early classification studies, such that a difficult choice of selecting one of these aspects is required. In this study, we propose a simple and yet effective method to provide uncertainty estimates for an interpretable early classification method. The question we address here is \"how to provide estimates of uncertainty in regard to interpretable early prediction.\" In our extensive evaluation on twenty time series datasets we showed that the proposed method has several advantages over the state-of-the-art method that provides reliability estimates in early classification. Namely, the proposed method is more effective than the state-of-the-art method, is simple to implement, and provides interpretable results.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85609725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kernel-based regression represents an important family of learning techniques for solving challenging regression tasks with non-linear patterns. Despite being studied extensively, most of the existing work suffers from two major drawbacks: (i) they are often designed for solving regression tasks in a batch learning setting, making them not only computationally inefficient and but also poorly scalable in real-world applications where data arrives sequentially; and (ii) they usually assume a fixed kernel function is given prior to the learning task, which could result in poor performance if the chosen kernel is inappropriate. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents a novel scheme of Online Multiple Kernel Regression (OMKR), which sequentially learns the kernel-based regressor in an online and scalable fashion, and dynamically explore a pool of multiple diverse kernels to avoid suffering from a single fixed poor kernel so as to remedy the drawback of manual/heuristic kernel selection. The OMKR problem is more challenging than regular kernel-based regression tasks since we have to on-the-fly determine both the optimal kernel-based regressor for each individual kernel and the best combination of the multiple kernel regressors. In this paper, we propose a family of OMKR algorithms for regression and discuss their application to time series prediction tasks. We also analyze the theoretical bounds of the proposed OMKR method and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its empirical performance on both real-world regression and times series prediction tasks.
{"title":"Online multiple kernel regression","authors":"Doyen Sahoo, S. Hoi, Bin Li","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623712","url":null,"abstract":"Kernel-based regression represents an important family of learning techniques for solving challenging regression tasks with non-linear patterns. Despite being studied extensively, most of the existing work suffers from two major drawbacks: (i) they are often designed for solving regression tasks in a batch learning setting, making them not only computationally inefficient and but also poorly scalable in real-world applications where data arrives sequentially; and (ii) they usually assume a fixed kernel function is given prior to the learning task, which could result in poor performance if the chosen kernel is inappropriate. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents a novel scheme of Online Multiple Kernel Regression (OMKR), which sequentially learns the kernel-based regressor in an online and scalable fashion, and dynamically explore a pool of multiple diverse kernels to avoid suffering from a single fixed poor kernel so as to remedy the drawback of manual/heuristic kernel selection. The OMKR problem is more challenging than regular kernel-based regression tasks since we have to on-the-fly determine both the optimal kernel-based regressor for each individual kernel and the best combination of the multiple kernel regressors. In this paper, we propose a family of OMKR algorithms for regression and discuss their application to time series prediction tasks. We also analyze the theoretical bounds of the proposed OMKR method and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its empirical performance on both real-world regression and times series prediction tasks.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89733084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Takeshi Kurashima, Tomoharu Iwata, Noriko Takaya, H. Sawada
The diffusion of information, rumors, and diseases are assumed to be probabilistic processes over some network structure. An event starts at one node of the network, and then spreads to the edges of the network. In most cases, the underlying network structure that generates the diffusion process is unobserved, and we only observe the times at which each node is altered/influenced by the process. This paper proposes a probabilistic model for inferring the diffusion network, which we call Probabilistic Latent Network Visualization (PLNV); it is based on cascade data, a record of observed times of node influence. An important characteristic of our approach is to infer the network by embedding it into a low-dimensional visualization space. We assume that each node in the network has latent coordinates in the visualization space, and diffusion is more likely to occur between nodes that are placed close together. Our model uses maximum a posteriori estimation to learn the latent coordinates of nodes that best explain the observed cascade data. The latent coordinates of nodes in the visualization space can 1) enable the system to suggest network layouts most suitable for browsing, and 2) lead to high accuracy in inferring the underlying network when analyzing the diffusion process of new or rare information, rumors, and disease.
{"title":"Probabilistic latent network visualization: inferring and embedding diffusion networks","authors":"Takeshi Kurashima, Tomoharu Iwata, Noriko Takaya, H. Sawada","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623646","url":null,"abstract":"The diffusion of information, rumors, and diseases are assumed to be probabilistic processes over some network structure. An event starts at one node of the network, and then spreads to the edges of the network. In most cases, the underlying network structure that generates the diffusion process is unobserved, and we only observe the times at which each node is altered/influenced by the process. This paper proposes a probabilistic model for inferring the diffusion network, which we call Probabilistic Latent Network Visualization (PLNV); it is based on cascade data, a record of observed times of node influence. An important characteristic of our approach is to infer the network by embedding it into a low-dimensional visualization space. We assume that each node in the network has latent coordinates in the visualization space, and diffusion is more likely to occur between nodes that are placed close together. Our model uses maximum a posteriori estimation to learn the latent coordinates of nodes that best explain the observed cascade data. The latent coordinates of nodes in the visualization space can 1) enable the system to suggest network layouts most suitable for browsing, and 2) lead to high accuracy in inferring the underlying network when analyzing the diffusion process of new or rare information, rumors, and disease.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86561069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Liangda Li, Hongbo Deng, Anlei Dong, Yi Chang, H. Zha
We consider a search task as a set of queries that serve the same user information need. Analyzing search tasks from user query streams plays an important role in building a set of modern tools to improve search engine performance. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic method for identifying and labeling search tasks based on the following intuitive observations: queries that are issued temporally close by users in many sequences of queries are likely to belong to the same search task, meanwhile, different users having the same information needs tend to submit topically coherent search queries. To capture the above intuitions, we directly model query temporal patterns using a special class of point processes called Hawkes processes, and combine topic models with Hawkes processes for simultaneously identifying and labeling search tasks. Essentially, Hawkes processes utilize their self-exciting properties to identify search tasks if influence exists among a sequence of queries for individual users, while the topic model exploits query co-occurrence across different users to discover the latent information needed for labeling search tasks. More importantly, there is mutual reinforcement between Hawkes processes and the topic model in the unified model that enhances the performance of both. We evaluate our method based on both synthetic data and real-world query log data. In addition, we also apply our model to query clustering and search task identification. By comparing with state-of-the-art methods, the results demonstrate that the improvement in our proposed approach is consistent and promising.
{"title":"Identifying and labeling search tasks via query-based hawkes processes","authors":"Liangda Li, Hongbo Deng, Anlei Dong, Yi Chang, H. Zha","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623679","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a search task as a set of queries that serve the same user information need. Analyzing search tasks from user query streams plays an important role in building a set of modern tools to improve search engine performance. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic method for identifying and labeling search tasks based on the following intuitive observations: queries that are issued temporally close by users in many sequences of queries are likely to belong to the same search task, meanwhile, different users having the same information needs tend to submit topically coherent search queries. To capture the above intuitions, we directly model query temporal patterns using a special class of point processes called Hawkes processes, and combine topic models with Hawkes processes for simultaneously identifying and labeling search tasks. Essentially, Hawkes processes utilize their self-exciting properties to identify search tasks if influence exists among a sequence of queries for individual users, while the topic model exploits query co-occurrence across different users to discover the latent information needed for labeling search tasks. More importantly, there is mutual reinforcement between Hawkes processes and the topic model in the unified model that enhances the performance of both. We evaluate our method based on both synthetic data and real-world query log data. In addition, we also apply our model to query clustering and search task identification. By comparing with state-of-the-art methods, the results demonstrate that the improvement in our proposed approach is consistent and promising.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89528677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shuang-Hong Yang, A. Kolcz, A. Schlaikjer, Pankaj Gupta
We are interested in organizing a continuous stream of sparse and noisy texts, known as "tweets", in real time into an ontology of hundreds of topics with measurable and stringently high precision. This inference is performed over a full-scale stream of Twitter data, whose statistical distribution evolves rapidly over time. The implementation in an industrial setting with the potential of affecting and being visible to real users made it necessary to overcome a host of practical challenges. We present a spectrum of topic modeling techniques that contribute to a deployed system. These include non-topical tweet detection, automatic labeled data acquisition, evaluation with human computation, diagnostic and corrective learning and, most importantly, high-precision topic inference. The latter represents a novel two-stage training algorithm for tweet text classification and a close-loop inference mechanism for combining texts with additional sources of information. The resulting system achieves 93% precision at substantial overall coverage.
{"title":"Large-scale high-precision topic modeling on twitter","authors":"Shuang-Hong Yang, A. Kolcz, A. Schlaikjer, Pankaj Gupta","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623336","url":null,"abstract":"We are interested in organizing a continuous stream of sparse and noisy texts, known as \"tweets\", in real time into an ontology of hundreds of topics with measurable and stringently high precision. This inference is performed over a full-scale stream of Twitter data, whose statistical distribution evolves rapidly over time. The implementation in an industrial setting with the potential of affecting and being visible to real users made it necessary to overcome a host of practical challenges. We present a spectrum of topic modeling techniques that contribute to a deployed system. These include non-topical tweet detection, automatic labeled data acquisition, evaluation with human computation, diagnostic and corrective learning and, most importantly, high-precision topic inference. The latter represents a novel two-stage training algorithm for tweet text classification and a close-loop inference mechanism for combining texts with additional sources of information. The resulting system achieves 93% precision at substantial overall coverage.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76108677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andreas Züfle, Tobias Emrich, Klaus Arthur Schmid, N. Mamoulis, A. Zimek, M. Renz
This paper targets the problem of computing meaningful clusterings from uncertain data sets. Existing methods for clustering uncertain data compute a single clustering without any indication of its quality and reliability; thus, decisions based on their results are questionable. In this paper, we describe a framework, based on possible-worlds semantics; when applied on an uncertain dataset, it computes a set of representative clusterings, each of which has a probabilistic guarantee not to exceed some maximum distance to the ground truth clustering, i.e., the clustering of the actual (but unknown) data. Our framework can be combined with any existing clustering algorithm and it is the first to provide quality guarantees about its result. In addition, our experimental evaluation shows that our representative clusterings have a much smaller deviation from the ground truth clustering than existing approaches, thus reducing the effect of uncertainty.
{"title":"Representative clustering of uncertain data","authors":"Andreas Züfle, Tobias Emrich, Klaus Arthur Schmid, N. Mamoulis, A. Zimek, M. Renz","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623725","url":null,"abstract":"This paper targets the problem of computing meaningful clusterings from uncertain data sets. Existing methods for clustering uncertain data compute a single clustering without any indication of its quality and reliability; thus, decisions based on their results are questionable. In this paper, we describe a framework, based on possible-worlds semantics; when applied on an uncertain dataset, it computes a set of representative clusterings, each of which has a probabilistic guarantee not to exceed some maximum distance to the ground truth clustering, i.e., the clustering of the actual (but unknown) data. Our framework can be combined with any existing clustering algorithm and it is the first to provide quality guarantees about its result. In addition, our experimental evaluation shows that our representative clusterings have a much smaller deviation from the ground truth clustering than existing approaches, thus reducing the effect of uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74229476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper addresses geospatial interpolation for meteorological measurements in which we estimate the values of climatic metrics at unsampled sites with existing observations. Providing climatological and meteorological conditions covering a large region is potentially useful in many applications, such as smart grid. However, existing research works on interpolation either cause a large number of complex calculations or are lack of high accuracy. We propose a Bayesian compressed sensing based non-parametric statistical model to efficiently perform the spatial interpolation task. Student-t priors are employed to model the sparsity of unknown signals' coefficients, and the Approximated Variational Inference (AVI) method is provided for effective and fast learning. The presented model has been deployed at IBM, targeting for aiding the intelligent management of smart grid. The evaluations on two real world datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in both effectiveness and efficiency.
{"title":"Novel geospatial interpolation analytics for general meteorological measurements","authors":"Bingsheng Wang, Jinjun Xiong","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623367","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses geospatial interpolation for meteorological measurements in which we estimate the values of climatic metrics at unsampled sites with existing observations. Providing climatological and meteorological conditions covering a large region is potentially useful in many applications, such as smart grid. However, existing research works on interpolation either cause a large number of complex calculations or are lack of high accuracy. We propose a Bayesian compressed sensing based non-parametric statistical model to efficiently perform the spatial interpolation task. Student-t priors are employed to model the sparsity of unknown signals' coefficients, and the Approximated Variational Inference (AVI) method is provided for effective and fast learning. The presented model has been deployed at IBM, targeting for aiding the intelligent management of smart grid. The evaluations on two real world datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in both effectiveness and efficiency.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73810136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
B. Dalessandro, Daizhuo Chen, T. Raeder, C. Perlich, Melinda Han Williams, F. Provost
Internet display advertising is a critical revenue source for publishers and online content providers, and is supported by massive amounts of user and publisher data. Targeting display ads can be improved substantially with machine learning methods, but building many models on massive data becomes prohibitively expensive computationally. This paper presents a combination of strategies, deployed by the online advertising firm Dstillery, for learning many models from extremely high-dimensional data efficiently and without human intervention. This combination includes: (i)~A method for simple-yet-effective transfer learning where a model learned from data that is relatively abundant and cheap is taken as a prior for Bayesian logistic regression trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) from the more expensive target data. (ii)~A new update rule for automatic learning rate adaptation, to support learning from sparse, high-dimensional data, as well as the integration with adaptive regularization. We present an experimental analysis across 100 different ad campaigns, showing that the transfer learning indeed improves performance across a large number of them, especially at the start of the campaigns. The combined "hands-free" method needs no fiddling with the SGD learning rate, and we show that it is just as effective as using expensive grid search to set the regularization parameter for each campaign.
{"title":"Scalable hands-free transfer learning for online advertising","authors":"B. Dalessandro, Daizhuo Chen, T. Raeder, C. Perlich, Melinda Han Williams, F. Provost","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623349","url":null,"abstract":"Internet display advertising is a critical revenue source for publishers and online content providers, and is supported by massive amounts of user and publisher data. Targeting display ads can be improved substantially with machine learning methods, but building many models on massive data becomes prohibitively expensive computationally. This paper presents a combination of strategies, deployed by the online advertising firm Dstillery, for learning many models from extremely high-dimensional data efficiently and without human intervention. This combination includes: (i)~A method for simple-yet-effective transfer learning where a model learned from data that is relatively abundant and cheap is taken as a prior for Bayesian logistic regression trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) from the more expensive target data. (ii)~A new update rule for automatic learning rate adaptation, to support learning from sparse, high-dimensional data, as well as the integration with adaptive regularization. We present an experimental analysis across 100 different ad campaigns, showing that the transfer learning indeed improves performance across a large number of them, especially at the start of the campaigns. The combined \"hands-free\" method needs no fiddling with the SGD learning rate, and we show that it is just as effective as using expensive grid search to set the regularization parameter for each campaign.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80619597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The increasing sophistication of malicious software calls for new defensive techniques that are harder to evade, and are capable of protecting users against novel threats. We present AESOP, a scalable algorithm that identifies malicious executable files by applying Aesop's moral that "a man is known by the company he keeps." We use a large dataset voluntarily contributed by the members of Norton Community Watch, consisting of partial lists of the files that exist on their machines, to identify close relationships between files that often appear together on machines. AESOP leverages locality-sensitive hashing to measure the strength of these inter-file relationships to construct a graph, on which it performs large scale inference by propagating information from the labeled files (as benign or malicious) to the preponderance of unlabeled files. AESOP attained early labeling of 99% of benign files and 79% of malicious files, over a week before they are labeled by the state-of-the-art techniques, with a 0.9961 true positive rate at flagging malware, at 0.0001 false positive rate.
{"title":"Guilt by association: large scale malware detection by mining file-relation graphs","authors":"Acar Tamersoy, Kevin A. Roundy, Duen Horng Chau","doi":"10.1145/2623330.2623342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2623330.2623342","url":null,"abstract":"The increasing sophistication of malicious software calls for new defensive techniques that are harder to evade, and are capable of protecting users against novel threats. We present AESOP, a scalable algorithm that identifies malicious executable files by applying Aesop's moral that \"a man is known by the company he keeps.\" We use a large dataset voluntarily contributed by the members of Norton Community Watch, consisting of partial lists of the files that exist on their machines, to identify close relationships between files that often appear together on machines. AESOP leverages locality-sensitive hashing to measure the strength of these inter-file relationships to construct a graph, on which it performs large scale inference by propagating information from the labeled files (as benign or malicious) to the preponderance of unlabeled files. AESOP attained early labeling of 99% of benign files and 79% of malicious files, over a week before they are labeled by the state-of-the-art techniques, with a 0.9961 true positive rate at flagging malware, at 0.0001 false positive rate.","PeriodicalId":20536,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86051665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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