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Vasant Honavar

Publications and source records attributed to Vasant Honavar.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2021

Zooming Into the Darknet: Characterizing Internet Background Radiation and its Structural Changes

Network telescopes or "Darknets" provide a unique window into Internet-wide malicious activities associated with malware propagation, denial of service attacks, scanning performed for network reconnaissance, and others. Analyses of the resulting data can provide actionable insights to security analysts that can be used to prevent or mitigate cyber-threats. Large Darknets, however, observe millions of nefarious events on a daily basis which makes the transformation of the captured information into meaningful insights challenging. We present a novel framework for characterizing Darknet behavior and its temporal evolution aiming to address this challenge. The proposed framework: (i) Extracts a high dimensional representation of Darknet events composed of features distilled from Darknet data and other external sources; (ii) Learns, in an unsupervised fashion, an information-preserving low-dimensional representation of these events (using deep representation learning) that is amenable to clustering; (iv) Performs clustering of the scanner data in the resulting representation space and provides interpretable insights using optimal decision trees; and (v) Utilizes the clustering outcomes as "signatures" that can be used to detect structural changes in the Darknet activities. We evaluate the proposed system on a large operational Network Telescope and demonstrate its ability to detect real-world, high-impact cybersecurity incidents.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2020

Longitudinal Deep Kernel Gaussian Process Regression

Gaussian processes offer an attractive framework for predictive modeling from longitudinal data, i.e., irregularly sampled, sparse observations from a set of individuals over time. However, such methods have two key shortcomings: (i) They rely on ad hoc heuristics or expensive trial and error to choose the effective kernels, and (ii) They fail to handle multilevel correlation structure in the data. We introduce Longitudinal deep kernel Gaussian process regression (L-DKGPR), which to the best of our knowledge, is the only method to overcome these limitations by fully automating the discovery of complex multilevel correlation structure from longitudinal data. Specifically, L-DKGPR eliminates the need for ad hoc heuristics or trial and error using a novel adaptation of deep kernel learning that combines the expressive power of deep neural networks with the flexibility of non-parametric kernel methods. L-DKGPR effectively learns the multilevel correlation with a novel addictive kernel that simultaneously accommodates both time-varying and the time-invariant effects. We derive an efficient algorithm to train L-DKGPR using latent space inducing points and variational inference. Results of extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that L-DKGPR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art longitudinal data analysis (LDA) methods.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2020

Explainable Multivariate Time Series Classification: A Deep Neural Network Which Learns To Attend To Important Variables As Well As Informative Time Intervals

Time series data is prevalent in a wide variety of real-world applications and it calls for trustworthy and explainable models for people to understand and fully trust decisions made by AI solutions. We consider the problem of building explainable classifiers from multi-variate time series data. A key criterion to understand such predictive models involves elucidating and quantifying the contribution of time varying input variables to the classification. Hence, we introduce a novel, modular, convolution-based feature extraction and attention mechanism that simultaneously identifies the variables as well as time intervals which determine the classifier output. We present results of extensive experiments with several benchmark data sets that show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on multi-variate time series classification task. The results of our case studies demonstrate that the variables and time intervals identified by the proposed method make sense relative to available domain knowledge.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2020

A Causal Lens for Peeking into Black Box Predictive Models: Predictive Model Interpretation via Causal Attribution

With the increasing adoption of predictive models trained using machine learning across a wide range of high-stakes applications, e.g., health care, security, criminal justice, finance, and education, there is a growing need for effective techniques for explaining such models and their predictions. We aim to address this problem in settings where the predictive model is a black box; That is, we can only observe the response of the model to various inputs, but have no knowledge about the internal structure of the predictive model, its parameters, the objective function, and the algorithm used to optimize the model. We reduce the problem of interpreting a black box predictive model to that of estimating the causal effects of each of the model inputs on the model output, from observations of the model inputs and the corresponding outputs. We estimate the causal effects of model inputs on model output using variants of the Rubin Neyman potential outcomes framework for estimating causal effects from observational data. We show how the resulting causal attribution of responsibility for model output to the different model inputs can be used to interpret the predictive model and to explain its predictions. We present results of experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to the interpretation of black box predictive models via causal attribution in the case of deep neural network models trained on one synthetic data set (where the input variables that impact the output variable are known by design) and two real-world data sets: Handwritten digit classification, and Parkinson's disease severity prediction. Because our approach does not require knowledge about the predictive model algorithm and is free of assumptions regarding the black box predictive model except that its input-output responses be observable, it can be applied, in principle, to any black box predictive model.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Towards Robust Relational Causal Discovery

We consider the problem of learning causal relationships from relational data. Existing approaches rely on queries to a relational conditional independence (RCI) oracle to establish and orient causal relations in such a setting. In practice, queries to a RCI oracle have to be replaced by reliable tests for RCI against available data. Relational data present several unique challenges in testing for RCI. We study the conditions under which traditional iid-based conditional independence (CI) tests yield reliable answers to RCI queries against relational data. We show how to conduct CI tests against relational data to robustly recover the underlying relational causal structure. Results of our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Algorithmic Bias in Recidivism Prediction: A Causal Perspective

ProPublica's analysis of recidivism predictions produced by Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) software tool for the task, has shown that the predictions were racially biased against African American defendants. We analyze the COMPAS data using a causal reformulation of the underlying algorithmic fairness problem. Specifically, we assess whether COMPAS exhibits racial bias against African American defendants using FACT, a recently introduced causality grounded measure of algorithmic fairness. We use the Neyman-Rubin potential outcomes framework for causal inference from observational data to estimate FACT from COMPAS data. Our analysis offers strong evidence that COMPAS exhibits racial bias against African American defendants. We further show that the FACT estimates from COMPAS data are robust in the presence of unmeasured confounding.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2019

LMLFM: Longitudinal Multi-Level Factorization Machine

We consider the problem of learning predictive models from longitudinal data, consisting of irregularly repeated, sparse observations from a set of individuals over time. Such data often exhibit {\em longitudinal correlation} (LC) (correlations among observations for each individual over time), {\em cluster correlation} (CC) (correlations among individuals that have similar characteristics), or both. These correlations are often accounted for using {\em mixed effects models} that include {\em fixed effects} and {\em random effects}, where the fixed effects capture the regression parameters that are shared by all individuals, whereas random effects capture those parameters that vary across individuals. However, the current state-of-the-art methods are unable to select the most predictive fixed effects and random effects from a large number of variables, while accounting for complex correlation structure in the data and non-linear interactions among the variables. We propose Longitudinal Multi-Level Factorization Machine (LMLFM), to the best of our knowledge, the first model to address these challenges in learning predictive models from longitudinal data. We establish the convergence properties, and analyze the computational complexity, of LMLFM. We present results of experiments with both simulated and real-world longitudinal data which show that LMLFM outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of predictive accuracy, variable selection ability, and scalability to data with large number of variables. The code and supplemental material is available at \url{https://github.com/junjieliang672/LMLFM}.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2019

The Dynamical Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model in the Longitudinal Scenario

The Dynamical Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models provide an elegant non-parametric framework for learning the low dimensional representations of the high-dimensional time-series. Real world observational studies, however, are often ill-conditioned: the observations can be noisy, not assuming the luxury of relatively complete and equally spaced like those in time series. Such conditions make it difficult to learn reasonable representations in the high dimensional longitudinal data set by way of Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model as well as other dimensionality reduction procedures. In this study, we approach the inference of Gaussian Process Dynamical Systems in Longitudinal scenario by augmenting the bound in the variational approximation to include systematic samples of the unseen observations. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach on synthetic as well as the human motion capture data set.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Node Injection Attacks on Graphs via Reinforcement Learning

Real-world graph applications, such as advertisements and product recommendations make profits based on accurately classify the label of the nodes. However, in such scenarios, there are high incentives for the adversaries to attack such graph to reduce the node classification performance. Previous work on graph adversarial attacks focus on modifying existing graph structures, which is infeasible in most real-world applications. In contrast, it is more practical to inject adversarial nodes into existing graphs, which can also potentially reduce the performance of the classifier. In this paper, we study the novel node injection poisoning attacks problem which aims to poison the graph. We describe a reinforcement learning based method, namely NIPA, to sequentially modify the adversarial information of the injected nodes. We report the results of experiments using several benchmark data sets that show the superior performance of the proposed method NIPA, relative to the existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

MEGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Multi-View Network Embedding

Data from many real-world applications can be naturally represented by multi-view networks where the different views encode different types of relationships (e.g., friendship, shared interests in music, etc.) between real-world individuals or entities. There is an urgent need for methods to obtain low-dimensional, information preserving and typically nonlinear embeddings of such multi-view networks. However, most of the work on multi-view learning focuses on data that lack a network structure, and most of the work on network embeddings has focused primarily on single-view networks. Against this background, we consider the multi-view network representation learning problem, i.e., the problem of constructing low-dimensional information preserving embeddings of multi-view networks. Specifically, we investigate a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework for Multi-View Network Embedding, namely MEGAN, aimed at preserving the information from the individual network views, while accounting for connectivity across (and hence complementarity of and correlations between) different views. The results of our experiments on two real-world multi-view data sets show that the embeddings obtained using MEGAN outperform the state-of-the-art methods on node classification, link prediction and visualization tasks.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2019

Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making: An Excursion Through the Lens of Causality

As virtually all aspects of our lives are increasingly impacted by algorithmic decision making systems, it is incumbent upon us as a society to ensure such systems do not become instruments of unfair discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. We consider the problem of determining whether the decisions made by such systems are discriminatory, through the lens of causal models. We introduce two definitions of group fairness grounded in causality: fair on average causal effect (FACE), and fair on average causal effect on the treated (FACT). We use the Rubin-Neyman potential outcomes framework for the analysis of cause-effect relationships to robustly estimate FACE and FACT. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on synthetic data. Our analyses of two real-world data sets, the Adult income data set from the UCI repository (with gender as the protected attribute), and the NYC Stop and Frisk data set (with race as the protected attribute), show that the evidence of discrimination obtained by FACE and FACT, or lack thereof, is often in agreement with the findings from other studies. We further show that FACT, being somewhat more nuanced compared to FACE, can yield findings of discrimination that differ from those obtained using FACE.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Multi-View Network Embedding Via Graph Factorization Clustering and Co-Regularized Multi-View Agreement

Real-world social networks and digital platforms are comprised of individuals (nodes) that are linked to other individuals or entities through multiple types of relationships (links). Sub-networks of such a network based on each type of link correspond to distinct views of the underlying network. In real-world applications, each node is typically linked to only a small subset of other nodes. Hence, practical approaches to problems such as node labeling have to cope with the resulting sparse networks. While low-dimensional network embeddings offer a promising approach to this problem, most of the current network embedding methods focus primarily on single view networks. We introduce a novel multi-view network embedding (MVNE) algorithm for constructing low-dimensional node embeddings from multi-view networks. MVNE adapts and extends an approach to single view network embedding (SVNE) using graph factorization clustering (GFC) to the multi-view setting using an objective function that maximizes the agreement between views based on both the local and global structure of the underlying multi-view graph. Our experiments with several benchmark real-world single view networks show that GFC-based SVNE yields network embeddings that are competitive with or superior to those produced by the state-of-the-art single view network embedding methods when the embeddings are used for labeling unlabeled nodes in the networks. Our experiments with several multi-view networks show that MVNE substantially outperforms the single view methods on integrated view and the state-of-the-art multi-view methods. We further show that even when the goal is to predict labels of nodes within a single target view, MVNE outperforms its single-view counterpart suggesting that the MVNE is able to extract the information that is useful for labeling nodes in the target view from the all of the views.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Improving Image Captioning by Leveraging Knowledge Graphs

We explore the use of a knowledge graphs, that capture general or commonsense knowledge, to augment the information extracted from images by the state-of-the-art methods for image captioning. The results of our experiments, on several benchmark data sets such as MS COCO, as measured by CIDEr-D, a performance metric for image captioning, show that the variants of the state-of-the-art methods for image captioning that make use of the information extracted from knowledge graphs can substantially outperform those that rely solely on the information extracted from images.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2018

Top-N-Rank: A Scalable List-wise Ranking Method for Recommender Systems

We propose Top-N-Rank, a novel family of list-wise Learning-to-Rank models for reliably recommending the N top-ranked items. The proposed models optimize a variant of the widely used discounted cumulative gain (DCG) objective function which differs from DCG in two important aspects: (i) It limits the evaluation of DCG only on the top N items in the ranked lists, thereby eliminating the impact of low-ranked items on the learned ranking function; and (ii) it incorporates weights that allow the model to leverage multiple types of implicit feedback with differing levels of reliability or trustworthiness. Because the resulting objective function is non-smooth and hence challenging to optimize, we consider two smooth approximations of the objective function, using the traditional sigmoid function and the rectified linear unit (ReLU). We propose a family of learning-to-rank algorithms (Top-N-Rank) that work with any smooth objective function. Then, a more efficient variant, Top-N-Rank.ReLU, is introduced, which effectively exploits the properties of ReLU function to reduce the computational complexity of Top-N-Rank from quadratic to linear in the average number of items rated by users. The results of our experiments using two widely used benchmarks, namely, the MovieLens data set and the Amazon Video Games data set demonstrate that: (i) The `top-N truncation' of the objective function substantially improves the ranking quality of the top N recommendations; (ii) using the ReLU for smoothing the objective function yields significant improvement in both ranking quality as well as runtime as compared to using the sigmoid; and (iii) Top-N-Rank.ReLU substantially outperforms the well-performing list-wise ranking methods in terms of ranking quality.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2018

Compositional Stochastic Average Gradient for Machine Learning and Related Applications

Many machine learning, statistical inference, and portfolio optimization problems require minimization of a composition of expected value functions (CEVF). Of particular interest is the finite-sum versions of such compositional optimization problems (FS-CEVF). Compositional stochastic variance reduced gradient (C-SVRG) methods that combine stochastic compositional gradient descent (SCGD) and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent (SVRG) methods are the state-of-the-art methods for FS-CEVF problems. We introduce compositional stochastic average gradient descent (C-SAG) a novel extension of the stochastic average gradient method (SAG) to minimize composition of finite-sum functions. C-SAG, like SAG, estimates gradient by incorporating memory of previous gradient information. We present theoretical analyses of C-SAG which show that C-SAG, like SAG, and C-SVRG, achieves a linear convergence rate when the objective function is strongly convex; However, C-CAG achieves lower oracle query complexity per iteration than C-SVRG. Finally, we present results of experiments showing that C-SAG converges substantially faster than full gradient (FG), as well as C-SVRG.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2017

Big Data, Data Science, and Civil Rights

Advances in data analytics bring with them civil rights implications. Data-driven and algorithmic decision making increasingly determine how businesses target advertisements to consumers, how police departments monitor individuals or groups, how banks decide who gets a loan and who does not, how employers hire, how colleges and universities make admissions and financial aid decisions, and much more. As data-driven decisions increasingly affect every corner of our lives, there is an urgent need to ensure they do not become instruments of discrimination, barriers to equality, threats to social justice, and sources of unfairness. In this paper, we argue for a concrete research agenda aimed at addressing these concerns, comprising five areas of emphasis: (i) Determining if models and modeling procedures exhibit objectionable bias; (ii) Building awareness of fairness into machine learning methods; (iii) Improving the transparency and control of data- and model-driven decision making; (iv) Looking beyond the algorithm(s) for sources of bias and unfairness-in the myriad human decisions made during the problem formulation and modeling process; and (v) Supporting the cross-disciplinary scholarship necessary to do all of that well.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2015

Lifted Representation of Relational Causal Models Revisited: Implications for Reasoning and Structure Learning

Maier et al. (2010) introduced the relational causal model (RCM) for representing and inferring causal relationships in relational data. A lifted representation, called abstract ground graph (AGG), plays a central role in reasoning with and learning of RCM. The correctness of the algorithm proposed by Maier et al. (2013a) for learning RCM from data relies on the soundness and completeness of AGG for relational d-separation to reduce the learning of an RCM to learning of an AGG. We revisit the definition of AGG and show that AGG, as defined in Maier et al. (2013b), does not correctly abstract all ground graphs. We revise the definition of AGG to ensure that it correctly abstracts all ground graphs. We further show that AGG representation is not complete for relational d-separation, that is, there can exist conditional independence relations in an RCM that are not entailed by AGG. A careful examination of the relationship between the lack of completeness of AGG for relational d-separation and faithfulness conditions suggests that weaker notions of completeness, namely adjacency faithfulness and orientation faithfulness between an RCM and its AGG, can be used to learn an RCM from data.

cs.AI↗