Digital Commons Network^™

Superb: Superior Behavior-Based Anomaly Detection Defining Authorized Users' Traffic Patterns, Daniel Karasek

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Network anomalies are correlated to activities that deviate from regular behavior patterns in a network, and they are undetectable until their actions are defined as malicious. Current work in network anomaly detection includes network-based and host-based intrusion detection systems. However, network anomaly detection schemes can suffer from high false detection rates due to the base rate fallacy. When the detection rate is less than the false positive rate, which is found in network anomaly detection schemes working with live data, a high false detection rate can occur. To overcome such a drawback, this paper proposes a superior behavior-based anomaly detection …

A Physics-Based Machine Learning Study Of The Behavior Of Interstitial Helium In Single Crystal W–Mo Binary Alloys, Adib J. Samin

Faculty Publications

In this work, the behavior of dilute interstitial helium in W–Mo binary alloys was explored through the application of a first principles-informed neural network (NN) in order to study the early stages of helium-induced damage and inform the design of next generation materials for fusion reactors. The neural network (NN) was trained using a database of 120 density functional theory (DFT) calculations on the alloy. The DFT database of computed solution energies showed a linear dependence on the composition of the first nearest neighbor metallic shell. This NN was then employed in a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation, which took into …

Applying Imitation And Reinforcement Learning To Sparse Reward Environments, Haven Brown

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The focus of this project was to shorten the time it takes to train reinforcement learning agents to perform better than humans in a sparse reward environment. Finding a general purpose solution to this problem is essential to creating agents in the future capable of managing large systems or performing a series of tasks before receiving feedback. The goal of this project was to create a transition function between an imitation learning algorithm (also referred to as a behavioral cloning algorithm) and a reinforcement learning algorithm. The goal of this approach was to allow an agent to first learn to …

Investigating Machine Learning Techniques For Gesture Recognition With Low-Cost Capacitive Sensing Arrays, Michael Fahr Jr.

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Machine learning has proven to be an effective tool for forming models to make predictions based on sample data. Supervised learning, a subset of machine learning, can be used to map input data to output labels based on pre-existing paired data. Datasets for machine learning can be created from many different sources and vary in complexity, with popular datasets including the MNIST handwritten dataset and CIFAR10 image dataset. The focus of this thesis is to test and validate multiple machine learning models for accurately classifying gestures performed on a low-cost capacitive sensing array. Multiple neural networks are trained using gesture …

Randomized And Evolutionary Approaches To Dataset Characterization, Feature Weighting, And Sampling In K-Nearest Neighbors, Suryoday Basak

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) has remained one of the most popular methods for supervised machine learning tasks. However, its performance often depends on the characteristics of the dataset and on appropriate feature scaling. In this thesis, characteristics of a dataset that make it suitable for being used within KNN are explored. As part of this, two new measures for dataset dispersion, called mean neighborhood target variance (MNTV), and mean neighborhood target entropy (MNTE) are developed to help determine the performance we expect while using KNN regressors and classifiers, respectively. It is empirically demonstrated that these measures of dispersion can be indicative …

Sl2mf: Predicting Synthetic Lethality In Human Cancers Via Logistic Matrix Factorization, Yong Liu, Min Wu, Chenghao Liu, Xiao-Li Li, Jie Zheng

Student Publications

Synthetic lethality (SL) is a promising concept for novel discovery of anti-cancer drug targets. However, wet-lab experiments for detecting SLs are faced with various challenges, such as high cost, low consistency across platforms, or cell lines. Therefore, computational prediction methods are needed to address these issues. This paper proposes a novel SL prediction method, named $\mathsf{SL}^2 \mathsf{MF}$, which employs logistic matrix factorization to learn latent representations of genes from the observed SL data. The probability that two genes are likely to form SL is modeled by the linear combination of gene latent vectors. As known SL pairs are more trustworthy …

Mechanical And Thermal Behavior Of Multiscale Bi-Nano-Composites Using Experiments And Machine Learning Predictions, Vahid Daghigh

Theses and Dissertations

The mechanical and thermal properties of natural short latania fiber (SLF)-reinforced poly(propylene)/ethylene-propylene-diene-monomer (SLF/PP/EPDM) bio-composites reinforced with nano-clays (NCs), pistachio shell powders (PSPs), and/or date seed particles (DSPs) were studied using experiments and machine learning (ML) predictions. This dissertation embraces three related investigations: (1) an assessment of maleated polypropylene (MAPP) coupling agent on mechanical and thermal behavior of SLF/PP/EPDM composites, (2) heat deflection temperature (HDT) of bio-nano-composites using experiments and ML predictions, and (3) fracture toughness ML predictions of short fiber, nano- and micro-particle reinforced composites. The first project (Chapter 2) investigates the influence of MAPP on tensile, bending, Charpy impact …

Airfoil Analysis And Design Using Surrogate Models, Nicholas Alexander Michael

Theses and Dissertations

A study was performed to compare two different methods for generating surrogate models for the analysis and design of airfoils. Initial research was performed to compare the accuracy of surrogate models for predicting the lift and drag of an airfoil with data collected from highidelity simulations using a modern CFD code along with lower-order models using a panel code. This was followed by an evaluation of the Class Shape Trans- formation (CST) method for parameterizing airfoil geometries as a prelude to the use of surrogate models for airfoil design optimization and the implementation of software to use CST to modify …

Temporal Localization Of Video Topics Using The Yt8m Dataset: An Exploration, Katherine Riedling

Honors Scholar Theses

Due to the progress made in computing resources and artificial intelligence, applications in computer vision have gained a lot of traction over the past decade. One such application applies to video understanding and content analysis, which are the main goals of the annual YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge. In the newest challenge, the aim is to localize events to specific video segments in addition to discerning the main topics of the video. This paper introduces and presents a broad overview of techniques, data, and the top-performing algorithms presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) conference last year. Ensemble methods …

How We Refactor And How We Document It? On The Use Of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms To Classify Refactoring Documentation, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well-established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent studies have shown that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development-related activities that go beyond improving the design especially with the emerging challenges in contemporary software engineering. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to developer interviews and a reduced set of projects. To cope with the above-mentioned limitations, …

Forensic Memory Classification Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks, Aishwarya Afzulpurkar

Theses

The goal of this project is to advance the application of machine learning frameworks and tools in the process of malware detection. Specifically, a deep neural network architecture is proposed to classify application modules as benign or malicious, using the lower level memory block patterns that make up these modules. The modules correspond to blocks of functionality within files used in kernel and OS level processes as well as user level applications. The learned model is proposed to reside in an isolated core with strict communication restrictions to achieve incorruptibility as well as efficiency, therefore providing a probabilistic memory-level view …

Learning Abstractions For Planning, Brian Charles Cook

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Planners for hard problems must exploit domain-specific structure to find solutions efficiently. Yet, hand-engineered solutions and optimizations are often expensive and difficult or impossible to adapt to other problems. This work applies automatic machine learning techniques to increase planner performance for specific problem domains and to learn useful abstract representations for planning. In particular, this dissertation develops methods to address important aspects of learning in planning in four different areas: State-of-the-art domain-independent classical planners utilize multiple search heuristics and decide how to allocate computational effort between heuristics prior to planning. This work presents a heuristic planning algorithm that uses a …

Development Of Fully Balanced Ssfp And Computer Vision Applications For Mri-Assisted Radiosurgery (Mars), Jeremiah Sanders

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. Brachytherapy is a highly effective treatment option for prostate cancer, and is the most cost-effective initial treatment among all other therapeutic options for low to intermediate risk patients of prostate cancer. In low-dose-rate (LDR) brachytherapy, verifying the location of the radioactive seeds within the prostate and in relation to critical normal structures after seed implantation is essential to ensuring positive treatment outcomes.

One current gap in knowledge is how to simultaneously image the prostate, surrounding anatomy, and radioactive seeds within the …

A Machine Learning Framework For Prediction Of Diagnostic Trouble Codes In Automobiles, Mohan Kopuru

Theses and Dissertations

Predictive Maintenance is an important solution to the rising maintenance costs in the industries. With the advent of intelligent computer and availability of data, predictive maintenance is seen as a solution to predict and prevent the occurrence of the faults in the different types of machines. This thesis provides a detailed methodology to predict the occurrence of critical Diagnostic Trouble codes that are observed in a vehicle in order to take necessary maintenance actions before occurrence of the fault in automobiles using Convolutional Neural Network architecture.

A Generalized Gaussian Process Likelihood For Psychometric Function Estimation, Jonathan Wenhan Chen

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Psychometric functions model the relationship between a physical phenomenon, an independent variable, and a subject’s performance on a cognitive task. The estimation of these psychometric functions is critical for the understanding of perception and cognition as well as for the diagnosis and treatment of many sensory conditions. The ability to estimate psychometric functions of any complexity is necessary to this end. In the following thesis, a generalized likelihood function for psychometric function estimation with Gaussian processes is described and validated. Such a likelihood function is necessary to enable the usage of Gaussian processes for the estimation of non-zero guess and …

A Framework For Vector-Weighted Deep Neural Networks, Carter Chiu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The vast majority of advances in deep neural network research operate on the basis of a real-valued weight space. Recent work in alternative spaces have challenged and complemented this idea; for instance, the use of complex- or binary-valued weights have yielded promising and fascinating results. We propose a framework for a novel weight space consisting of vector values which we christen VectorNet. We first develop the theoretical foundations of our proposed approach, including formalizing the requisite theory for forward and backpropagating values in a vector-weighted layer. We also introduce the concept of expansion and aggregation functions for conversion between real …

Computational Techniques In Medical Image Analysis Application For White Blood Cells Classification., Omar Dekhil

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

White blood cells play important rule in the human body immunity and any change in their count may cause serious diseases. In this study, a system is introduced for white blood cells localization and classification. The dataset used in this study is formed by two components, the first is the annotation dataset that will be used in the localization (364 images), and the second is labeled classes that will be used in the classification (12,444 images). For the localization, two approaches will be discussed, a classical approach and a deep learning based approach. For the classification, 5 different deep learning …

High-Capacity Directional Graph Networks, Miguel Dominguez

Theses

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have proven themselves to be a useful tool in many computer vision problems. One of the most popular forms of the DNN is the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN effectively learns features on images by learning a weighted sum of local neighborhoods of pixels, creating filtered versions of the image. Point cloud analysis seems like it would benefit from this useful model. However, point clouds are much less structured than images. Many analogues to CNNs for point clouds have been proposed in the literature, but they are often much more constrained networks than the typical …

Identifying Performance Regression From The Commit Phase Utilizing Machine Learning Techniques, Max Mendelson

Theses

Over the lifespan of a software application, it is inevitable that changes to the source code will be made that causes unintended slowdowns in functionality. These slowdowns are referred to as performance regression. Typically projects who are particularly concerned about performance have performance testing that are run to identify if a performance regression is introduced into the code. This is difficult however due to how time consuming and resource intensive running performance tests are when trying to simulate a realistic scenario.

The study of De Oliveira et. al. (Perphecy) [4] suggests a technique to predict the likelihood that a commit …

Behavioral Model Anomaly Detection In Automatic Identification Systems (Ais), Jacob Coleman

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Over 90% of all goods in the world, at some point in their life, are on a vessel at sea. Currently, the maritime industry relies on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for collision avoidance and vessel tracking. AIS is an unencrypted, unauthenticated protocol that is vulnerable to various types of cyber attacks allowing malicious actors to alter the location of vessels. With the advent of the Ocean of Things (OoT), vessels are sharing more information than vessel location alone at sea. Increasingly, more information is becoming critical for safe and efficient operation at sea. This method is a novel approach …

Determinants Of Safety Outcomes In Organizations: Exploring O*Net Data To Predict Occupational Accident Rates, Lavanya Shravan Kumar

Theses and Dissertations

Workplace safety is of utmost importance given the regular occurrence of both fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries all around the world. Although research in this area is hugely prevalent, it is focused mainly on safety climate and lacks an integrated approach when examining predictors of safety outcomes. The development of an occupational risk factor that predicts safety outcomes will aid in understanding the relative importance of different factors that contribute to safety and help organizations target their safety programs and interventions efficiently. The present study is an exploratory analysis utilizing publicly available O*NET data (work activities, work context features, and …

Classification Of Labour Pain Using Electroencephalogram Signal Based On Wavelet Method, Chong Yeh Sai

Student Works (2020-2029)

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the recording of electrical activity of the cerebral cortex through electrodes placed on the scalp. EEG is used to acquire neurophysiological signals for application in clinical diagnosis and brain computer interface (BCI). However, in practical settings the EEG signals are often contaminated by signal artifacts known as the biological and environmental artifacts. These artifacts degrade EEG signals, thereby obstructing clinical diagnosis or BCI applications by distorting the observed power spectrum. Procedures for automated removal of EEG artifacts are frequently sought after in pre-processing and filtering of the EEG signals. In recent years, a combination of independent component …

Classification Of Dividend News Based On The Movement Of The Share Market Prices Of Public Listed Companies In Bursa Malaysia, Vijaya Kumar Shubana

Student Works (2020-2029)

Stock market is naturally complex and plays a major role in towards the nation’s growth. However, the performance of a company in stock market varies due to many influences but not limited to economics, political and financial related news. This study attempts to classify the share market dividend news announcement in Bursa Malaysia based on the pattern of share market price. Samples including five hundred (500) observations of dividend news from forty-seven (47) listed companies in Bursa Malaysia during the period of 2000 to 2018 are used in this study. There are three (3) main objectives in this study which …

Supervised Optimal Decision Machine Learning Approach To Class- And Method-Level Data Preprocessing Towards Effective Software Defect Prediction, Felix Ebubeogu Amarachukwu

Student Works (2020-2029)

Software defect prediction provides actionable outputs to software teams while contributing to industrial success. Therefore, predicting the number of defects in a new version of software at both the class and method levels is an important goal of defect prediction studies to assist software teams in optimizing their test efforts towards improving software quality. However, despite remarkable achievements in defect prediction, the quality of the data applied in defect prediction studies has been a major concern, with related quality issues leading to numerous contradictory findings in machine learning research. In addition, a demonstrated approach for predicting the number of defects …

Machine Learning Modeling Of Horizontal Photovoltaics Using Weather And Location Data, Christil Pasion, Torrey J. Wagner, Clay Koschnick, Steven J. Schuldt, Jada B. Williams, Kevin Hallinan

Faculty Publications

Solar energy is a key renewable energy source; however, its intermittent nature and potential for use in distributed systems make power prediction an important aspect of grid integration. This research analyzed a variety of machine learning techniques to predict power output for horizontal solar panels using 14 months of data collected from 12 northern-hemisphere locations. We performed our data collection and analysis in the absence of irradiation data—an approach not commonly found in prior literature. Using latitude, month, hour, ambient temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, and cloud ceiling as independent variables, a distributed random forest regression algorithm modeled the combined …

Applications Of Machine Learning In High-Frequency Trade Direction Classification, Jared E. Hansen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The correct assignment of trades as buyer-initiated or seller-initiated is paramount in many quantitative finance studies. Simple decision rule methods have been used for signing trades since many data sets available to researchers do not include the sign of each trade executed. By utilizing these decision rule methods, as well as engineering new variables from available data, we have demonstrated that machine learning models outperform prior methods for accurately signing trades as buys and sells, achieving state-of-the-art results. The best model developed was 4.5 percentage points more accurate than older methods when predicting onto unseen data. Since finance and economics …

Automated Identification Of Libraries From Vulnerability Data, Chen Yang, Andrew Santosa, Asankhaya Sharma, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) has gained traction in recent years with a number of commercial offerings from various companies. SCA involves vulnerability curation process where a group of security researchers, using various data sources, populate a database of open-source library vulnerabilities, which is used by a scanner to inform the end users of vulnerable libraries used by their applications. One of the data sources used is the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The key challenge faced by the security researchers here is in figuring out which libraries are related to each of the reported vulnerability in NVD. In this article, we …

Evaluating Machine Learning Models For Semantic Segmentation Over Cloud Images For Classification, Harsh Nagarkar

Honors Theses

Due to the increasing number of available approaches nowadays, choosing the most accurate image semantic segmentation model has become hard. The purpose of this research is to find the best-performing image semantic segmentation model for Cloud classification. For the purpose of this study, a data set of cloud images from the Max Planck Institute for meteorology is used. These images were taken from the by two NASA space satellite.Three main models UNet, PSPNet and FPN were used in combination of 4 differ-ent encoder Inception-ResNet-v2, MobileNet-v2, ResNet-34, and ResNet 101. After training all the models in the Mississippi Center for Super …

Publicly Available Machine Learning Models For Identifying Opioid Misuse From The Clinical Notes Of Hospitalized Patients, Brihat Sharma, Dmitriy Dligach, Kristin Swope, Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, Niranjan S. Karnik, Cara Joyce, Majid Afshar

Biostatistics Collaborative Core: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Background: Automated de-identification methods for removing protected health information (PHI) from the source notes of the electronic health record (EHR) rely on building systems to recognize mentions of PHI in text, but they remain inadequate at ensuring perfect PHI removal. As an alternative to relying on de-identification systems, we propose the following solutions: (1) Mapping the corpus of documents to standardized medical vocabulary (concept unique identifier [CUI] codes mapped from the Unified Medical Language System) thus eliminating PHI as inputs to a machine learning model; and (2) training character-based machine learning models that obviate the need for a dictionary containing …

Crafting Adversarial Examples Using Particle Swarm Optimization, Rayan Mosli

Theses

Machine learning models have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks that apply small perturbations to input samples to get them misclassified. Attacks that search for and apply the perturbations are performed in both white-box and black-box settings, depending on the information available to the attacker about the target. For black-box attacks, the attacker can only query the target with specially crafted inputs and observing the outputs returned by the model. These outputs are used to guide the perturbations and create adversarial examples that are then misclassified.

Current black-box attacks on API-based malware classifiers rely solely on feature insertion …