arXiv subjects

Md Zahidul Islam

Publications and source records attributed to Md Zahidul Islam.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Hybrid Machine Learning Framework for Herd-Level Cattle Growth Pattern and Weight Gain Forecasting in Grazing-Based Production Systems

Commercial grazing systems yield irregular livestock observations, which challenge cattle growth forecasting. This study developed a hybrid machine learning framework for herd level cattle weight forecasting using automated sensing observations collected between 2022 and 2024 in southeastern Australia. Weekly live weight observations, demographic variables, and lagged environmental predictors were integrated into structured forecasting datasets. Herd level forecasting trajectories were generated through temporal aggregation of animal level predictions. Four hybrid architecture families were evaluated, including residual, stacked, cascade, and ensemble assisted frameworks. ARIMA, LSTM, and GRU models were used as comparative baselines. Independent testing demonstrated strong predictive agreement across multiple forecasting horizons. The cascade GB to RF to NN architecture achieved the best performance, with a test R^2 of 0.889, RMSE of 21.319 kg, and MAE of 15.462 kg. Hybrid architectures maintained greater robustness than recurrent sequential models under sparse observation conditions. Forecasting error increased progressively across extended prediction horizons. Feature importance analysis identified animal age, rainfall, and temperature as dominant predictors influencing herd level growth forecasting. The proposed framework may support feed allocation, grazing management, and livestock marketing decisions under heterogeneous sensing environments.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Behavioral Information Leakage in Darknet Traffic: A Multi-Channel Analysis Across Anonymity Networks

Existing darknet traffic classification studies largely emphasize predictive accuracy while offering limited insight into the behavioral mechanisms that make encrypted services distinguishable. This paper proposes a behavioral information leakage framework that decomposes flow-level traffic into control, structural, and rhythmic descriptor groups across Tor, I2P, FreeNet, and ZeroNet. The framework combines normalized mutual information analysis with Random Forest-based predictive validation, structural-rhythmic interaction analysis, and cross-network service-variability evaluation under leakage-safe repeated stratified cross-validation. Results show that behavioral leakage varies considerably across anonymity networks. Tor achieves the highest service separability, with a Macro-F1 of 0.7165 and cumulative normalized leakage of 3.9461, whereas FreeNet exhibits the lowest combined leakage of 0.8744. Packet-size organization, directional exchange imbalance, packet tempo, and silence-burst behavior emerge as the main leakage mechanisms. The combined structural-rhythmic representation consistently provides the strongest within-network performance, while leave-one-network-out evaluation reveals limited transferability across anonymity architectures. The proposed Service Variability Index and Leakage Variability Index further show that video exhibits consistent network-specific separability, whereas chat and email demonstrate greater variability across anonymity-network pairs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Open-World Darknet Traffic Recognition Under Leave-One-Service-Out Evaluation

Darknet traffic recognition is critical for cyber threat intelligence, as anonymity networks are often used to conceal malicious activity. However, most existing studies rely on closed-world evaluation, assuming all service categories are known during training and testing, which is unrealistic in real-world environments. This paper presents an open-world darknet traffic classification framework using leave-one-service-out evaluation and uncertainty-aware classification with Random Forest and XGBoost models. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance degradation when transitioning from closed-world to open-world settings, demonstrating that closed-world evaluation substantially overestimates deployment robustness. For example, XGBoost Macro-F1 decreases from 88.8% to 46.1% in the I2P environment, while Random Forest performance drops from 87.4% to 45.7%. Although uncertainty-based rejection slightly improves robustness, strong behavioral similarity between known and unknown services leads to frequent misclassification. Semantic absorption analysis further shows that FreeNet video traffic is classified as browsing traffic with an 88.1% assignment rate, while I2P peer-to-peer traffic is absorbed into FTP-related behavior with an 83.4% assignment rate. The findings demonstrate that behavioral overlap remains a major challenge for reliable open-world darknet traffic classification.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

DDQN-MLP: An Explainable and Adversarially Robust DRL-Guided Adaptive Learning Framework for Ransomware Detection

Ransomware detection remains challenging because modern variants exhibit diverse, evasive, and partly benign-like behaviors that undermine fixed supervised learning objectives. This study proposes DDQN-MLP, a training-time deep reinforcement learning framework for behavioral ransomware detection using Windows 11 sandbox telemetry. A Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) acts as a discrete adaptive sample-weighting controller by observing batch-level loss and prediction-confidence dynamics and assigning sample-importance weights to guide a lightweight Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). After training, the DDQN is discarded, leaving only the efficient MLP for deployment. The framework was evaluated using 5-fold stratified cross-validation on a balanced dataset of 2,000 executable profiles comprising 1,000 ransomware samples from 30 families and 1,000 benign samples. DDQN-MLP achieved 99.30% accuracy, an F1-score of 0.9930, and an ROC-AUC of 0.9991, outperforming conventional static weighting, focal-loss, and alternative DRL variants. Explainability was assessed using SHAP and LIME, together with a SHAP-gradient alignment diagnostic for evaluating consistency between feature attribution and model sensitivity. White-box adversarial testing across multiple perturbation levels further showed that adversarial training improved feature-space robustness without reducing clean-data accuracy. The results demonstrate that DDQN-MLP provides an accurate, explainable, robust, and computationally efficient framework for high-throughput ransomware detection.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

SA-DRL: Security-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ransomware Detection with Asymmetric Reward Design

Ransomware detection is a security-critical task in which false negatives and false positives have unequal operational consequences. Conventional machine learning detectors often use symmetric objectives that penalize missed ransomware detections and benign false alarms equally, although a false negative can cause irreversible encryption, operational disruption, and high recovery cost, whereas a false positive is usually reversible. This study proposes a Security-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning (SA-DRL) framework that embeds false-negative and false-positive cost asymmetry into the reinforcement learning reward signal to prioritize missed-detection reduction. The framework also introduces a Security-Optimal Model Selection (SOMS) criterion and an adaptive episode-level sample-ordering mechanism. Four deep reinforcement learning agents, DQN, DDQN, PPO, and A2C, were evaluated using a symmetric baseline reward (R1) and a security-aware asymmetric reward (R2). Experiments used four discount factors, five-fold cross-validation, and three random seeds, resulting in 480 training runs on a balanced ransomware detection dataset. The SOMS criterion selects models by prioritizing false-negative rate, followed by F1-score and training time. Results show that asymmetric reward shaping improves security-oriented detection performance. The SOMS-selected configuration, DDQN with R2 and gamma = 0.1, achieved a false-negative rate of 0.0080, an F1-score of 0.9915, and an AUC of 0.998, reducing missed detections by 67.6% compared with the best supervised baseline. Across all configurations, R2 reduced the mean false-negative rate by 43% relative to R1. These findings show that reward-function design is important for security-sensitive ransomware detection.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Auditable Machine Unlearning for Privacy-Compliant Ransomware Detection Using Multi-Shard SISA and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Ransomware poses an escalating cybersecurity threat as attackers continuously modify behavioral patterns to evade static defenses. Although existing machine learning-based detectors often achieve strong predictive performance, they generally assume fixed training data and do not support the selective removal of previously learned samples. This limitation conflicts with privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, which require the removal of sensitive user data upon request. To address this challenge, we propose an auditable ransomware detection and unlearning framework that integrates deep reinforcement learning with multi-shard SISA retraining. In the proposed system, a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) learns a reward-guided detection policy from behavioral features under asymmetric security costs, while multi-shard SISA enables privacy-compliant selective sample removal through shard-level retraining. The framework was evaluated using four criteria: utility preservation, oracle-based forgetting validation, membership inference auditing, and computational efficiency. On a balanced Windows 11 behavioral dataset comprising 2,000 samples and 103 features, the baseline DDQN detector achieved an F1 score of 0.9925 and an AUC of 0.9983. The experimental results show that single-shard unlearning maintains minimal utility degradation and low oracle disagreement, whereas moderate shard counts (M = 5-10) provide the best efficiency-performance trade-off, reducing retraining time to 5-30 s compared with 80-330 s for full retraining. In addition, the membership inference scores remain close to 0.5 across most configurations, indicating limited privacy leakage after unlearning. These findings demonstrate that a privacy-compliant ransomware detection framework can jointly achieve high detection performance, auditable deletion verification, and efficient sample removal.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

TL-RL-FusionNet: An Adaptive and Efficient Reinforcement Learning-Driven Transfer Learning Framework for Detecting Evolving Ransomware Threats

Modern ransomware exhibits polymorphic and evasive behaviors by frequently modifying execution patterns to evade detection. This dynamic nature disrupts feature spaces and limits the effectiveness of static or predefined models. To address this challenge, we propose TL-RL-FusionNet, a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided hybrid framework that integrates frozen dual transfer learning (TL) backbones as feature extractors with a lightweight residual multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. The RL agent supervises training by adaptively reweighting samples in response to variations in observable ransomware behavior. Through reward and penalty signals, the agent prioritizes complex cases such as stealthy or polymorphic ransomware employing obfuscation, while down-weighting trivial samples including benign applications with simple file I/O operations or easily classified ransomware. This adaptive mechanism enables the model to dynamically refine its strategy, improving resilience against evolving threats while maintaining strong classification performance. The framework utilizes dynamic behavioral features such as file system activity, registry changes, network traffic, API calls, and anti-analysis checks, extracted from sandbox-generated JSON reports. These features are transformed into RGB images and processed using frozen EfficientNetB0 and InceptionV3 models to capture rich feature representations efficiently. Final classification is performed by a lightweight residual MLP guided by an RL (Q-learning) agent. Experiments on a balanced dataset of 1,000 samples (500 ransomware, 500 benign) show that TL-RL-FusionNet achieves 99.1% accuracy, 98.6% precision, 99.6% recall, and 99.74% AUC, outperforming non-RL baselines by up to 2.5% in accuracy and 3.1% in recall. Efficiency analysis shows 55% lower training time and 59% reduced RAM usage, demonstrating suitability for real-world deployment.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Privacy-Aware Machine Unlearning with SISA for Reinforcement Learning-Based Ransomware Detection

Ransomware detection systems increasingly rely on behavior-based machine learning to address evolving attack strategies. However, emerging privacy compliance, data governance, and responsible AI deployment demand not only accurate detection but also the ability to efficiently remove the influence of specific training samples without retraining the models from scratch. In this study, we present a privacy-aware machine unlearning evaluation framework for reinforcement learning (RL)-based ransomware detection built on Sharded, Isolated, Sliced, and Aggregated (SISA) training. The framework enables efficient data deletion by retraining only the affected model shards rather than the entire detector, reducing the retraining cost while preserving detection performance. We conduct a controlled comparative study using value-based RL agents, including Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), under identical experimental settings with a cost-sensitive reward design and 5-fold cross-validation on Windows 11 ransomware dataset. Detection confidence is evaluated using a continuous Q-score margin, enabling ROC-AUC analysis beyond binary predictions. For unlearning, the dataset is partitioned into five shards with majority-vote aggregation, and a fast-unlearning path is evaluated by deleting 5% of the samples from a single shard and retraining only that shard. Results show that SISA-based unlearning incurs negligible utility degradation (<= 0.05 percent F1 drop) while substantially reducing retraining time relative to full SISA retraining. DDQN exhibits slightly improved stability and lower utility loss than DQN, while both agents maintain near identical in-distribution performance after unlearning. These findings indicate that SISA provides an efficient unlearning mechanism for RL-based ransomware detection, supporting privacy-aware deployment without compromising security effectiveness.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Communication Network-Aware Missing Data Recovery for Enhanced Distribution Grid Visibility

Power distribution systems increasingly rely on dense sensor networks for real-time monitoring, yet unreliable communication links and equipment malfunctions often result in missing or incomplete measurement sets at the operating center, requiring accurate data recovery techniques. Most existing approaches operate solely on the available measurements and overlook the role of the communication network that delivers sensor data, leading to large, spatially correlated losses when multiple sensors share failing communication links. This paper proposes a communication-aware framework that integrates routing constraints with low-rank matrix completion to improve data recovery accuracy under communication failures. Sensors are grouped into balanced clusters, and routing paths are designed to limit intracluster sensors sharing a common communication path, preventing complete data loss within any cluster. The remaining measurements for each cluster are then recovered using an optimal singular value thresholding (OSVT) method. Simulation results on the IEEE standard test feeder with real-world data demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves recovery accuracy compared to communication-agnostic, measurement-only methods.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

The Illusion of Friendship: Why Generative AI Demands Unprecedented Ethical Vigilance

GenAI systems are increasingly used for drafting, summarisation, and decision support, offering substantial gains in productivity and reduced cognitive load. However, the same natural language fluency that makes these systems useful can also blur the boundary between tool and companion. This boundary confusion may encourage some users to experience GenAI as empathic, benevolent, and relationally persistent. Emerging reports suggest that some users may form emotionally significant attachments to conversational agents, in some cases with harmful consequences, including dependency and impaired judgment. This paper develops a philosophical and ethical argument for why the resulting illusion of friendship is both understandable and can be ethically risky. Drawing on classical accounts of friendship, the paper explains why users may understandably interpret sustained supportive interaction as friend like. It then advances a counterargument that despite relational appearances, GenAI lacks moral agency: consciousness, intention, and accountability and therefore does not qualify as a true friend. To demystify the illusion, the paper presents a mechanism level explanation of how transformer based GenAI generates responses often producing emotionally resonant language without inner states or commitments. Finally, the paper proposes a safeguard framework for safe and responsible GenAI use to reduce possible anthropomorphic cues generated by the GenAI systems. The central contribution is to demystify the illusion of friendship and explain the computational background so that we can shift the emotional attachment with GenAI towards necessary human responsibility and thereby understand how institutions, designers, and users can preserve GenAI's benefits while mitigating over reliance and emotional misattribution.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Size and Smoothness Aware Adaptive Focal Loss for Small Tumor Segmentation

Deep learning has achieved remarkable accuracy in medical image segmentation, particularly for larger structures with well-defined boundaries. However, its effectiveness can be challenged by factors such as irregular object shapes and edges, non-smooth surfaces, small target areas, etc. which complicate the ability of networks to grasp the intricate and diverse nature of anatomical regions. In response to these challenges, we propose an Adaptive Focal Loss (A-FL) that takes both object boundary smoothness and size into account, with the goal to improve segmentation performance in intricate anatomical regions. The proposed A-FL dynamically adjusts itself based on an object's surface smoothness, size, and the class balancing parameter based on the ratio of targeted area and background. We evaluated the performance of the A-FL on the PICAI 2022 and BraTS 2018 datasets. In the PICAI 2022 dataset, the A-FL achieved an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.696 and a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.769, outperforming the regular Focal Loss (FL) by 5.5% and 5.4% respectively. It also surpassed the best baseline by 2.0% and 1.2%. In the BraTS 2018 dataset, A-FL achieved an IoU score of 0.883 and a DSC score of 0.931. Our ablation experiments also show that the proposed A-FL surpasses conventional losses (this includes Dice Loss, Focal Loss, and their hybrid variants) by large margin in IoU, DSC, and other metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/rakibuliuict/AFL-CIBM.git.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Mob-based cattle weight gain forecasting using ML models

Forecasting mob based cattle weight gain (MB CWG) may benefit large livestock farms, allowing farmers to refine their feeding strategies, make educated breeding choices, and reduce risks linked to climate variability and market fluctuations. In this paper, a novel technique termed MB CWG is proposed to forecast the one month advanced weight gain of herd based cattle using historical data collected from the Charles Sturt University Farm. This research employs a Random Forest (RF) model, comparing its performance against Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models for monthly weight gain prediction. Four datasets were used to evaluate the performance of models, using 756 sample data from 108 herd-based cattle, along with weather data (rainfall and temperature) influencing CWG. The RF model performs better than the SVR and LSTM models across all datasets, achieving an R^2 of 0.973, RMSE of 0.040, and MAE of 0.033 when both weather and age factors were included. The results indicate that including both weather and age factors significantly improves the accuracy of weight gain predictions, with the RF model outperforming the SVR and LSTM models in all scenarios. These findings demonstrate the potential of RF as a robust tool for forecasting cattle weight gain in variable conditions, highlighting the influence of age and climatic factors on herd based weight trends. This study has also developed an innovative automated pre processing tool to generate a benchmark dataset for MB CWG predictive models. The tool is publicly available on GitHub and can assist in preparing datasets for current and future analytical research..

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Cryptocurrency Price Forecasting Using Machine Learning: Building Intelligent Financial Prediction Models

Cryptocurrency markets are experiencing rapid growth, but this expansion comes with significant challenges, particularly in predicting cryptocurrency prices for traders in the U.S. In this study, we explore how deep learning and machine learning models can be used to forecast the closing prices of the XRP/USDT trading pair. While many existing cryptocurrency prediction models focus solely on price and volume patterns, they often overlook market liquidity, a crucial factor in price predictability. To address this, we introduce two important liquidity proxy metrics: the Volume-To-Volatility Ratio (VVR) and the Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP). These metrics provide a clearer understanding of market stability and liquidity, ultimately enhancing the accuracy of our price predictions. We developed four machine learning models, Linear Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LSTM neural networks, using historical data without incorporating the liquidity proxy metrics, and evaluated their performance. We then retrained the models, including the liquidity proxy metrics, and reassessed their performance. In both cases (with and without the liquidity proxies), the LSTM model consistently outperformed the others. These results underscore the importance of considering market liquidity when predicting cryptocurrency closing prices. Therefore, incorporating these liquidity metrics is essential for more accurate forecasting models. Our findings offer valuable insights for traders and developers seeking to create smarter and more risk-aware strategies in the U.S. digital assets market.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Machine Learning-Based Detection and Analysis of Suspicious Activities in Bitcoin Wallet Transactions in the USA

The dramatic adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the USA has revolutionized the financial landscape and provided unprecedented investment and transaction efficiency opportunities. The prime objective of this research project is to develop machine learning algorithms capable of effectively identifying and tracking suspicious activity in Bitcoin wallet transactions. With high-tech analysis, the study aims to create a model with a feature for identifying trends and outliers that can expose illicit activity. The current study specifically focuses on Bitcoin transaction information in America, with a strong emphasis placed on the importance of knowing about the immediate environment in and through which such transactions pass through. The dataset is composed of in-depth Bitcoin wallet transactional information, including important factors such as transaction values, timestamps, network flows, and addresses for wallets. All entries in the dataset expose information about financial transactions between wallets, including received and sent transactions, and such information is significant for analysis and trends that can represent suspicious activity. This study deployed three accredited algorithms, most notably, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines. In retrospect, Random Forest emerged as the best model with the highest F1 Score, showcasing its ability to handle non-linear relationships in the data. Insights revealed significant patterns in wallet activity, such as the correlation between unredeemed transactions and final balances. The application of machine algorithms in tracking cryptocurrencies is a tool for creating transparent and secure U.S. markets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning-based estimation of cattle weight gain and its influencing factors

Many cattle farmers still depend on manual methods to measure the live weight gain of cattle at set intervals, which is time consuming, labour intensive, and stressful for both the animals and handlers. A remote and autonomous monitoring system using machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) can provide a more efficient and less invasive method and also predictive capabilities for future cattle weight gain (CWG). This system allows continuous monitoring and estimation of individual cattle live weight gain, growth rates and weight fluctuations considering various factors like environmental conditions, genetic predispositions, feed availability, movement patterns and behaviour. Several researchers have explored the efficiency of estimating CWG using ML and DL algorithms. However, estimating CWG suffers from a lack of consistency in its application. Moreover, ML or DL can provide weight gain estimations based on several features that vary in existing research. Additionally, previous studies have encountered various data related challenges when estimating CWG. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation in estimating CWG using advanced ML techniques based on research articles (between 2004 and 2024). This study investigates the current tools, methods, and features used in CWG estimation, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. The findings highlight the significance of using advanced ML approaches in CWG estimation and its critical influence on factors. Furthermore, this study identifies potential research gaps and provides research direction on CWG prediction, which serves as a reference for future research in this area.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

CL3: A Collaborative Learning Framework for the Medical Data Ensuring Data Privacy in the Hyperconnected Environment

In a hyperconnected environment, medical institutions are particularly concerned with data privacy when sharing and transmitting sensitive patient information due to the risk of data breaches, where malicious actors could intercept sensitive information. A collaborative learning framework, including transfer, federated, and incremental learning, can generate efficient, secure, and scalable models while requiring less computation, maintaining patient data privacy, and ensuring an up-to-date model. This study aims to address the detection of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images through a proposed collaborative learning framework called CL3. Initially, transfer learning is employed, leveraging knowledge from a pre-trained model as the starting global model. Local models from different medical institutes are then integrated, and a new global model is constructed to adapt to any data drift observed in the local models. Additionally, incremental learning is considered, allowing continuous adaptation to new medical data without forgetting previously learned information. Experimental results demonstrate that the CL3 framework achieved a global accuracy of 89.99% when using Xception with a batch size of 16 after being trained for six federated communication rounds. A demo of the CL3 framework is available at https://github.com/zavidparvez/CL3-Collaborative-Approach to ensure reproducibility.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

MAPX: An explainable model-agnostic framework for the detection of false information on social media networks

The automated detection of false information has become a fundamental task in combating the spread of "fake news" on online social media networks (OSMN) as it reduces the need for manual discernment by individuals. In the literature, leveraging various content or context features of OSMN documents have been found useful. However, most of the existing detection models often utilise these features in isolation without regard to the temporal and dynamic changes oft-seen in reality, thus, limiting the robustness of the models. Furthermore, there has been little to no consideration of the impact of the quality of documents' features on the trustworthiness of the final prediction. In this paper, we introduce a novel model-agnostic framework, called MAPX, which allows evidence based aggregation of predictions from existing models in an explainable manner. Indeed, the developed aggregation method is adaptive, dynamic and considers the quality of OSMN document features. Further, we perform extensive experiments on benchmarked fake news datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of MAPX using various real-world data quality scenarios. Our empirical results show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art models evaluated. For reproducibility, a demo of MAPX is available at \href{https://github.com/SCondran/MAPX_framework}{this link}

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Seizure detection from Electroencephalogram signals via Wavelets and Graph Theory metrics

Epilepsy is one of the most prevalent neurological conditions, where an epileptic seizure is a transient occurrence due to abnormal, excessive and synchronous activity in the brain. Electroencephalogram signals emanating from the brain may be captured, analysed and then play a significant role in detection and prediction of epileptic seizures. In this work we enhance upon a previous approach that relied on the differing properties of the wavelet transform. Here we apply the Maximum Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform to both reduce signal \textit{noise} and use signal variance exhibited at differing inherent frequency levels to develop various metrics of connection between the electrodes placed upon the scalp. %The properties of both the noise reduced signal and the interconnected electrodes differ significantly during the different brain states. Using short duration epochs, to approximate close to real time monitoring, together with simple statistical parameters derived from the reconstructed noise reduced signals we initiate seizure detection. To further improve performance we utilise graph theoretic indicators from derived electrode connectivity. From there we build the attribute space. We utilise open-source software and publicly available data to highlight the superior Recall/Sensitivity performance of our approach, when compared to existing published methods.

q-bio.NC↗