2017

[1]

Probability Calibration Trees

Tim Leathart, Eibe Frank, Geoffrey Holmes, and Bernhard Pfahringer. Probability calibration trees. In Proc 9th Asian Conference on Machine Learning, Seoul, Korea, pages 145-160. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 2017.
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Obtaining accurate and well calibrated probability estimates from classiers is useful in many applications, for example, when minimising the expected cost of classications. Existing methods of calibrating probability estimates are applied globally, ignoring the potential for improvements by applying a more ne-grained model. We propose probability calibration trees, a modication of logistic model trees that identies regions of the input space in which dierent probability calibration models are learned to improve performance. We compare probability calibration trees to two widely used calibration methods|isotonic regression and Platt scaling|and show that our method results in lower root mean squared error on average than both methods, for estimates produced by a variety of base learners.

[2]

Learning Through Utility Optimization in Regression Tasks

Paula Branco, Luis Torgo, Rita P. Ribeiro, Eibe Frank, Bernhard Pfahringer, and Markus Michael Rau. Learning through utility optimization in regression tasks. In Proc 4th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, Tokyo Japan. IEEE, 2017.
[ bib | .pdf ]
Accounting for misclassification costs is important in many practical applications of machine learning, and costsensitive techniques for classification have been studied extensively. Utility-based learning provides a generalization of purely cost-based approaches that considers both costs and benefits, enabling application to domains with complex cost-benefit settings. However, there is little work on utility- or cost-based learning for regression. In this paper, we formally define the problem of utility-based regression and propose a strategy for maximizing the utility of regression models. We verify our findings in a large set of experiments that show the advantage of our proposal in a diverse set of domains, learning algorithms and cost/benefit settings.

[3]

Online estimation of discrete, continuous, and conditional joint densities using classifier chains

Michael Geilke, Andreas Karwath, Eibe Frank, and Stefan Kramer. Online estimation of discrete, continuous, and conditional joint densities using classifier chains. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
We address the problem of estimating discrete, continuous, and conditional joint densities online, i.e., the algorithm is only provided the current example and its current estimate for its update. The family of proposed online density estimators, estimation of densities online (EDO), uses classifier chains to model dependencies among features, where each classifier in the chain estimates the probability of one particular feature. Because a single chain may not provide a reliable estimate, we also consider ensembles of classifier chains and ensembles of weighted classifier chains. For all density estimators, we provide consistency proofs and propose algorithms to perform certain inference tasks. The empirical evaluation of the estimators is conducted in several experiments and on datasets of up to several millions of instances. In the discrete case, we compare our estimators to density estimates computed by Bayesian structure learners. In the continuous case, we compare them to a state-of-the-art online

[4]

Proximity Assurances Based on Natural and Artificial Ambient Environments

Iakovos Gurulian, Konstantinos Markantonakis, Carlton Shepherd, Eibe Frank, and Raja Naeem Akram. Proximity assurances based on natural and artificial ambient environments. In Proc 10th International Conference on Information Technology and Communications Security, Bucharest, Romania, pages 83-103. Springer, 2017.
[ bib | .pdf ]
Relay attacks are passive man-in-the-middle attacks that aim to extend the physical distance of devices involved in a transaction beyond their operating environment. In the eld of smart cards, distance bounding protocols have been proposed in order to counter relay attacks. For smartphones, meanwhile, the natural ambient environment surrounding the devices has been proposed as a potential Proximity and Relay-Attack Detection (PRAD) mechanism. These proposals, however, are not compliant with industry-imposed constraints that stipulate maximum transaction completion times, e.g. 500 milliseconds for EMV contactless transactions. We evaluated the eectiveness of 17 ambient sensors that are widely-available in modern smartphones as a PRAD method for time-restricted contactless transactions. In our work, both similarity- and machine learning-based analyses demonstrated limited eectiveness of natural ambient sensing as a PRAD mechanism under the operating requirements for proximity and transaction duration specied by EMV and ITSO. To address this, we propose the generation of an Articial Ambient Environment (AAE) as a robust alternative for an eective PRAD. The use of infrared light as a potential PRAD mechanism is evaluated, and our results indicate a high success rate while remaining compliant with industry requirements.

[5]

Accelerating the XGBoost algorithm using GPU computing

Rory Mitchell and Eibe Frank. Accelerating the XGBoost algorithm using GPU computing. PeerJ Computer Science, 3(e127), 2017.
[ bib | http ]
We present a CUDA-based implementation of a decision tree construction algorithm within the gradient boosting library XGBoost. The tree construction algorithm is executed entirely on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and shows high performance with a variety of datasets and settings, including sparse input matrices. Individual boosting iterations are parallelised, combining two approaches. An interleaved approach is used for shallow trees, switching to a more conventional radix sort-based approach for larger depths. We show speedups of between 3× and 6× using a Titan X compared to a 4 core i7 CPU, and 1.2× using a Titan X compared to 2× Xeon CPUs (24 cores). We show that it is possible to process the Higgs dataset (10 million instances, 28 features) entirely within GPU memory. The algorithm is made available as a plug-in within the XGBoost library and fully supports all XGBoost features including classification, regression and ranking tasks.

[6]

Large-scale automatic species identification

Jeff Mo, Eibe Frank, and Varvara Vetrova. Large-scale automatic species identification. In Proc 30th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Springer, 2017.
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The crowd-sourced Naturewatch GBIF dataset is used to obtain a species classication dataset containing approximately 1.2 million photos of nearly 20 thousand different species of biological organisms observed in their natural habitat. We present a general hierarchical species identication system based on deep convolutional neural networks trained on the NatureWatch dataset. The dataset contains images taken under a wide variety of conditions and is heavily imbalanced, with most species associated with only few images. We apply multi-view classification as a way to lend more influence to high frequency details, hierarchical fine-tuning to help with class imbalance and provide regularisation, and automatic specicity control for optimising classication depth. Our system achieves 55.8% accuracy when identifying individual species and around 90% accuracy at an average taxonomy depth of 5.1 - equivalent to the taxonomic rank of family - when applying automatic specicity control.

[7]

On the Effectiveness of Ambient Sensing for Detecting NFC Relay Attacks

Iakovos Gurulian, Carlton Shepherd, Eibe Frank, Konstantinos Markantonakis, Raja Naeem Akram, and Keith Mayes. On the effectiveness of ambient sensing for detecting NFC relay attacks. In Proc 6th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, Sydney, Australia. IEEE, 2017.
[ bib | .pdf ]
Smartphones with Near-Field Communication (NFC) may emulate contactless smart cards, which has resulted in the deployment of various access control, transportation and payment services, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay. Like contactless cards, however, NFC-based smartphone transactions are susceptible to relay attacks, and ambient sensing has been suggested as a potential countermeasure. In this study, we empirically evaluate the suitability of ambient sensors as a proximity detection mechanism for smartphone-based transactions under EMV constraints. We underpin our study using sensing data collected from 17 sensors from an emulated relay attack test-bed to assess whether they can thwart such attacks effectively. Each sensor, where feasible, was used to record 350-400 legitimate and relay (illegitimate) contactless transactions at two different physical locations. Our analysis provides an empirical foundation upon which to determine the efficacy of ambient sensing for providing a strong anti-relay mechanism in security-sensitive applications. We demonstrate that no single, evaluated mobile ambient sensor is suitable for such critical applications under realistic deployment constraints.

[8]

The Applicability of Ambient Sensors as Proximity Evidence for NFC Transactions

Carlton Shepherd, Iakovos Gurulian, Konstantinos Markantonakis, Eibe Frank, Raja Naeem Akram, Emmanouil Panaousis, and Keith Mayes. The applicability of ambient sensors as proximity evidence for NFC transactions. In Proc 6th Workshop on Mobile Security Technologies (MoST), San Jose, United States. IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, 2017.
[ bib | .pdf ]
Near Field Communication (NFC) has enabled mobile phones to emulate contactless smart cards. Similar to contactless smart cards, they are also susceptible to relay attacks. To counter these, a number of methods have been proposed that rely primarily on ambient sensors as a proximity detection mechanism (also known as an anti-relay mechanism). In this paper, we empirically evaluate a comprehensive set of ambient sensors for their effectiveness as a proximity detection mechanism for NFC contactless-based applications like banking, transport and high-security access controls. We selected 17 sensors available via the Google Android platform. Each sensor, where feasible, was used to record the measurements of 1,000 contactless transactions at four different physical locations. A total of 252 users, a random sample from the university student population, were involved during the field trials. After careful analysis, we conclude that no single evaluated mobile ambient sensor is suitable for proximity detection in NFC-based contactless applications in realistic deployment scenarios. Lastly, we identify a number of potential avenues that may improve their effectiveness.

[9]

WASSA-2017 Shared Task on Emotion Intensity

Saif M. Mohammad and Felipe Bravo-Marquez. WASSA-2017 shared task on emotion intensity. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2017.
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We present the first shared task on detecting the intensity of emotion felt by the speaker of a tweet. We create the first datasets of tweets annotated for anger, fear, joy, and sadness intensities using a technique called best–worst scaling (BWS). We show that the annotations lead to reliable fine-grained intensity scores (rankings of tweets by intensity). The data was partitioned into training, development, and test sets for the competition. Twenty-two teams participated in the shared task, with the best system obtaining a Pearson correlation of 0.747 with the gold intensity scores. We summarize the machine learning setups, resources, and tools used by the participating teams, with a focus on the techniques and resources that are particularly useful for the task. The emotion intensity dataset and the shared task are helping improve our understanding of how we convey more or less intense emotions through language.

[10]

Emotion Intensities in Tweets

Saif M. Mohammad and Felipe Bravo-Marquez. Emotion intensities in tweets. In Proceedings of the sixth joint conference on lexical and computational semantics (*Sem), Vancouver, Canada, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
This paper examines the task of detecting intensity of emotion from text. We create the first datasets of tweets annotated for anger, fear, joy, and sadness intensities. We use a technique called best–worst scaling (BWS) that improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores. We show that emotion-word hashtags often impact emotion intensity, usually conveying a more intense emotion. Finally, we create a benchmark regression system and conduct experiments to determine: which features are useful for detecting emotion intensity; and, the extent to which two emotions are similar in terms of how they manifest in language.

[11]

Extremely Fast Decision Tree Mining for Evolving Data Streams

Albert Bifet, Jiajin Zhang, Wei Fan, Cheng He, Jianfeng Zhang, Jianfeng Qian, Geoff Holmes, and Bernhard Pfahringer. Extremely fast decision tree mining for evolving data streams. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Halifax, NS, Canada, August 13 - 17, 2017, pages 1733-1742, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
Nowadays real-time industrial applications are generating a huge amount of data continuously every day. To process these large data streams, we need fast and efficient methodologies and systems. A useful feature desired for data scientists and analysts is to have easy to visualize and understand machine learning models. Decision trees are preferred in many real-time applications for this reason, and also, because combined in an ensemble, they are one of the most powerful methods in machine learning. In this paper, we present a new system called STREAMDM-C++, that implements decision trees for data streams in C++, and that has been used extensively at Huawei. Streaming decision trees adapt to changes on streams, a huge advantage since standard decision trees are built using a snapshot of data, and can not evolve over time. STREAMDM-C++ is easy to extend, and contains more powerful ensemble methods, and a more efficient and easy to use adaptive decision trees. We compare our new implementation with VFML, the current state of the art implementation in C, and show how our new system outperforms VFML in speed using less resources.

[12]

A survey on feature drift adaptation: Definition, benchmark, challenges and future directions

Jean Paul Barddal, Heitor Murilo Gomes, Fabrício Enembreck, and Bernhard Pfahringer. A survey on feature drift adaptation: Definition, benchmark, challenges and future directions. Journal of Systems and Software, 127:278-294, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
Data stream mining is a fast growing research topic due to the ubiquity of data in several real-world problems. Given their ephemeral nature, data stream sources are expected to undergo changes in data distribution, a phenomenon called concept drift. This paper focuses on one specific type of drift that has not yet been thoroughly studied, namely feature drift. Feature drift occurs whenever a subset of features becomes, or ceases to be, relevant to the learning task; thus, learners must detect and adapt to these changes accordingly. We survey existing work on feature drift adaptation with both explicit and implicit approaches. Additionally, we benchmark several algorithms and a naive feature drift detection approach using synthetic and real-world datasets. The results from our experiments indicate the need for future research in this area as even naive approaches produced gains in accuracy while reducing resources usage. Finally, we state current research topics, challenges and future directions for feature drift adaptation.

[13]

Foreword: special issue for the journal track of the 8th Asian conference on machine learning (ACML 2016)

Robert J. Durrant, Kee-Eung Kim, Geoffrey Holmes, Stephen Marsland, Masashi Sugiyama, and Zhi-Hua Zhou. Foreword: special issue for the journal track of the 8th asian conference on machine learning (ACML 2016). Machine Learning, 106(5):623-625, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
[14]

Aesthetic Local Search of Wind Farm Layouts

Michael Mayo and Maisa Daoud. Aesthetic local search of wind farm layouts. Information, 8(2):39, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
The visual impact of wind farm layouts has seen little consideration in the literature on the wind farm layout optimisation problem to date. Most existing algorithms focus on optimising layouts for power or the cost of energy alone. In this paper, we consider the geometry of wind farm layouts and whether it is possible to bi-optimise a layout for both energy efficiency and the degree of visual impact that the layout exhibits. We develop a novel optimisation approach for solving the problem which measures mathematically the degree of visual impact of a layout. The approach draws inspiration from the field of architecture. To evaluate our ideas, we demonstrate them on three benchmark problems for the wind farm layout optimisation problem in conjunction with two recently-published stochastic local search algorithms. Optimal patterned layouts are shown to be very close in terms of energy efficiency to optimal non-patterned layouts.

[15]

Constructing Document Vectors Using Kernel Density Estimates

Michael Mayo and Sean Goltz. Constructing document vectors using kernel density estimates. In Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence - 14th International Conference, MDAI 2017, Kitakyushu, Japan, October 18-20, 2017, Proceedings, pages 183-194, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
Document vector embeddings are numeric fixed length representations of text documents that can be used for machine learning and text mining purposes. We describe in this paper a new technique for generating document vectors. Our novel idea builds on the recently popular notion of neural word vector embeddings and combines this concept with the statistics of kernel density estimation. We show that robust document vectors can be produced using our new algorithm, and perform an experiment involving several challenging text classification datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness.

[16]

Surrogate modeling a computational fluid dynamics-based wind turbine wake simulation using machine learning

Brett Wilson, Sarah Wakes, and Michael Mayo. Surrogate modeling a computational fluid dynamics-based wind turbine wake simulation using machine learning. In 2017 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, SSCI 2017, Honolulu, HI, USA, November 27 - Dec. 1, 2017, pages 1-8, 2017.
[ bib | http ]
The wind farm layout optimisation problem involves finding the optimal locations for wind turbines on a wind farm site in order to minimise the so-called “wake effect”. The wake effect is the effect of turbulence on wind velocity produced by a turbine's rotating blades. This results in reduction in power production and increased fatigue in downstream turbines inside the wake. This paper uses wind velocity data produced from expensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of a rotating wind turbine at various incoming wind speeds to generate ground truth wake data, and explores the ability of machine learning algorithms to create surrogate models for predicting the reduced-velocity wind speeds inside a wake. In an extensive evaluation, we show that (i) given data from a CFD simulation, we can construct a model to interpolate wind velocity inside the wake at any arbitrary 3D point with high levels of accuracy; and (ii) given data from several CFD simulations (the training data) we can also accurately predict wind velocities in the wake of CFD simulations that we have not yet run (i.e. we can extrapolate to simulations where the incoming wind speeds are different to those in the training data). The net effect of these findings are that they pave the way towards the construction of novel and improved wake models for wind turbines, which in turn can be incorporated into existing algorithms for solving wind farm layout optimisation problems more accurately.