Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards Long-Term Fairness In Sequential Decision Making, Yaowei Hu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the development of artificial intelligence, automated decision-making systems are increasingly integrated into various applications, such as hiring, loans, education, recommendation systems, and more. These machine learning algorithms are expected to facilitate faster, more accurate, and impartial decision-making compared to human judgments. Nevertheless, these expectations are not always met in practice due to biased training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes. In contemporary society, countering discrimination has become a consensus among people, leading the EU and the US to enact laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination based on factors such as gender, age, race, and religion. Consequently, addressing algorithmic discrimination has …

Adversarially Reweighted Sequence Anomaly Detection With Limited Log Data, Kevin Vulcano

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

In the realm of safeguarding digital systems, the ability to detect anomalies in log sequences is paramount, with applications spanning cybersecurity, network surveillance, and financial transaction monitoring. This thesis presents AdvSVDD, a sophisticated deep learning model designed for sequence anomaly detection. Built upon the foundation of Deep Support Vector Data Description (Deep SVDD), AdvSVDD stands out by incorporating Adversarial Reweighted Learning (ARL) to enhance its performance, particularly when confronted with limited training data. By leveraging the Deep SVDD technique to map normal log sequences into a hypersphere and harnessing the amplification effects of Adversarial Reweighted Learning, AdvSVDD demonstrates remarkable efficacy …

Intrusion Detection: Machine Learning Techniques For Software Defined Networks, Jacob S. Rodriguez

Masters Theses

In recent years, software defined networking (SDN) has gained popularity as a novel approach towards network management and architecture. Compared to traditional network architectures, this software-based approach offers greater flexibility, programmability, and automation. However, despite the advantages of this system, there still remains the possibility that it could be compromised. As we continue to explore new approaches to network management, we must also develop new ways of protecting those systems from threats. Throughout this paper, I will describe and test a network intrusion detection system (NIDS), and how it can be implemented within a software defined network. This system will …

Sarcasm Detection In English And Arabic Tweets Using Transformer Models, Rishik Lad

Computer Science Senior Theses

This thesis describes our approach toward the detection of sarcasm and its various types in English and Arabic Tweets through methods in deep learning. There are five problems we attempted: (1) detection of sarcasm in English Tweets, (2) detection of sarcasm in Arabic Tweets, (3) determining the type of sarcastic speech subcategory for English Tweets, (4) determining which of two semantically equivalent English Tweets is sarcastic, and (5) determining which of two semantically equivalent Arabic Tweets is sarcastic. All tasks were framed as classification problems, and our contributions are threefold: (a) we developed an English binary classifier system with RoBERTa, …

Using Deep Neural Networks To Classify Astronomical Images, Andrew D. Macpherson

Honors Projects

As the quantity of astronomical data available continues to exceed the resources available for analysis, recent advances in artificial intelligence encourage the development of automated classification tools. This paper lays out a framework for constructing a deep neural network capable of classifying individual astronomical images by describing techniques to extract and label these objects from large images.

Deep Learning With Attention Mechanisms In Breast Ultrasound Image Segmentation And Classification, Meng Xu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Breast cancer is a great threat to women’s health. Breast ultrasound (BUS) imaging is commonly used in the early detection of breast cancer as a portable, valuable, and widely available diagnosis tool. Automated BUS image analysis can assist radiologists in making accurate and fast decisions. Generally, automated BUS image analysis includes BUS image segmentation and classification. BUS image segmentation automatically extracts tumor regions from a BUS image. BUS image classification automatically classifies breast tumors into benign or malignant categories. Multi-task learning accomplishes segmentation and classification simultaneously, which makes it more appealing and practical than an either individual task. Deep neural …

Domain Specific Analysis Of Privacy Practices And Concerns In The Mobile Application Market, Fahimeh Ebrahimi Meymand

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile applications (apps) constantly demand access to sensitive user information in exchange for more personalized services. These-mostly unjustified-data collection tactics have raised major privacy concerns among mobile app users. Existing research on mobile app privacy aims to identify these concerns, expose apps with malicious data collection practices, assess the quality of apps' privacy policies, and propose automated solutions for privacy leak detection and prevention. However, existing solutions are generic, frequently missing the contextual characteristics of different application domains. To address these limitations, in this dissertation, we study privacy in the app store at a domain level. Our objective is to …

Multi-Domain Adaptation For Image Classification, Depth Estimation, And Semantic Segmentation, Yu Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The appearance of scenes may change for many reasons, including the viewpoint, the time of day, the weather, and the seasons. Traditionally, deep neural networks are trained and evaluated using images from the same scene and domain to avoid the domain gap. Recent advances in domain adaptation have led to a new type of method that bridges such domain gaps and learns from multiple domains.

This dissertation proposes methods for multi-domain adaptation for various computer vision tasks, including image classification, depth estimation, and semantic segmentation. The first work focuses on semi-supervised domain adaptation. I address this semi-supervised setting and propose …

Prediction Of Sumoylation Sites In Proteins From Language Model Representations, Evgenii Sidorov

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Sumoylation is an essential post-translational modification intimately involved in a diverse range of eukaryotic cellular mechanisms and plays a significant role in DNA repair. Some researchers hypothesize that a high level of SUMOylation events in cancer cells improves cells' chances for survival under stress conditions by regulating tumor-related proteins.

This study belongs to a booming field of harnessing computational power to the domain of life. Prediction of protein structure, its molecular function, and the design of new drugs are just a few examples of the applications within this exciting area of research. By leveraging computational power, researchers can analyze vast …

Unlocking User Identity: A Study On Mouse Dynamics In Dual Gaming Environments For Continuous Authentication, Marcho Setiawan Handoko

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

With the surge in information management technology reliance and the looming presence of cyber threats, user authentication has become paramount in computer security. Traditional static or one-time authentication has its limitations, prompting the emergence of continuous authentication as a frontline approach for enhanced security. Continuous authentication taps into behavior-based metrics for ongoing user identity validation, predominantly utilizing machine learning techniques to continually model user behaviors. This study elucidates the potential of mouse movement dynamics as a key metric for continuous authentication. By examining mouse movement patterns across two contrasting gaming scenarios - the high-intensity "Team Fortress" and the low-intensity strategic …

Online Sexual Predator Detection, Muhammad Khalid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online sexual abuse is a concerning yet severely overlooked vice of modern society. With more children being on the Internet and with the ever-increasing advent of web-applications such as online chatrooms and multiplayer games, preying on vulnerable users has become more accessible for predators. In recent years, there has been work on detecting online sexual predators using Machine Learning and deep learning techniques. Such work has trained on severely imbalanced datasets, and imbalance is handled via manual trimming of over-represented labels. In this work, we propose an approach that first tackles the problem of imbalance and then improves the effectiveness …

An Explainable Deep Learning Prediction Model For Severity Of Alzheimer's Disease From Brain Images, Godwin O. Ekuma

MSU Graduate Theses

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the go-to method for medical imaging classification on various imaging modalities for binary and multiclass problems. Deep CNNs extract spatial features from image data hierarchically, with deeper layers learning more relevant features for the classification application. The effectiveness of deep learning models are hampered by limited data sets, skewed class distributions, and the undesirable "black box" of neural networks, which decreases their understandability and usability in precision medicine applications. This thesis addresses the challenge of building an explainable deep learning model for a clinical application: predicting the severity of Alzheimer's disease (AD). AD …

Identifying Functional And Non-Functional Software Requirements From User App Reviews And Requirements Artifacts, Dev Jayant Dave

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis proposes and evaluates Machine Learning (ML) based data models to identify and isolate software requirements from datasets containing user app review statements. The ML models classify user app review statements into Functional Requirements (FRs), Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), and Non-Requirements (NRs). This proposed approach consisted of creating a novel hybrid dataset that contains software requirements from Software Requirements Specification (SRS) documents and user app reviews. The Support Vector Machine (SVM), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and Random Forest (RF) ML algorithms combined with the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) natural language processing (NLP) technique were implemented on the hybrid dataset. …

Classifying Blood Glucose Levels Through Noninvasive Features, Rishi Reddy

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Blood glucose monitoring is a key process in the prevention and management of certain chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Currently, glucose monitoring for those interested in their blood glucose levels are confronted with options that are primarily invasive and relatively costly. A growing topic of note is the development of non-invasive monitoring methods for blood glucose. This development holds a significant promise for improvement to the quality of life of a significant portion of the population and is overall met with great enthusiasm from the scientific community as well as commercial interest. This work aims to develop a potential pipeline …

Eeg Signals Classification Using Lstm-Based Models And Majority Logic, James A. Orgeron

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study of elecroencephalograms (EEGs) has gained enormous interest in the last decade with the increase of computational power and availability of EEG signals collected from various human activities or produced during medical tests. The applicability of analyzing EEG signals ranges from helping impaired people communicate or move (using appropriate medical equipment) to understanding people's feelings and detecting diseases.

We proposed new methodology and models for analyzing and classifying EEG signals collected from individuals observing visual stimuli. Our models rely on powerful Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network models, which are currently the state of the art models for performing …

Predicting Occurrence Of The Term Sarcopenia With Semi-Supervised Machine Learning, Kevin Flasch

Theses and Dissertations

Sarcopenia is a medical condition that involves loss of muscle mass. It has been difficult todefine and only recently assigned an official medical code, leading to many medical records lacking a coded diagnosis although the clinical note text may discuss it or symptoms of it. This thesis investigates the application of machine learning and natural language processing to analyze clinical note text to see how well the term ’sarcopenia’ can be predicted in clinical note text from records concerning the condition.

A variety of machine learning models combined with different features and text processingare tested against training data that mentions …

Deep Learning Applications In Medical Bioinformatics, Ziad Omar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After a patient’s breast cancer diagnosis, identifying breast cancer lymph node metastases is one of the most important and critical factor that is directly related to the patient’s survival. The traditional way to examine the existence of cancer cells in the breast lymph nodes is through a lymph node procedure, biopsy. The procedure process is time-consuming for the patient and the provider, costly, and lacks accuracy as not every lymph node is examined. The intent of this study is to develop an artificial neural network (ANNs) that would map genetic biomarkers to breast lymph node classes using ANNs. The neural …

Analysis Of Music Genre Clustering Algorithms, Samuel Walter Stern

Theses and Dissertations

Classification and clustering of music genres has become an increasingly prevalent focusin recent years, prompting a push for research into relevant algorithms. The most successful algorithms have typically applied the Naive Bayes or k-Nearest Neighbors algorithms, or used Neural Networks to perform classification. This thesis seeks to investigate the use of unsupervised clustering algorithms such as K-Means or Hierarchical clustering, and establish their usefulness in comparison to or conjunction with established methods.

Development Of Deep Learning Neural Network For Ecological And Medical Images, Shaobo Liu

Dissertations

Deep learning in computer vision and image processing has attracted attentions from various fields including ecology and medical image. Ecologists are interested in finding an effective model structure to classify different species. Tradition deep learning model use a convolutional neural network, such as LeNet, AlexNet, VGG models, residual neural network, and inception models, are first used on classifying bee wing and butterfly datasets. However, insufficient data sample and unbalanced samples in each class have caused a poor accuracy. To make improvement the test accuracy, data augmentation and transfer learning are applied. Recently developed deep learning framework based on mathematical morphology …

Machine Learning With Topological Data Analysis, Ephraim Robert Love

Doctoral Dissertations

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a relatively new focus in the fields of statistics and machine learning. Methods of exploiting the geometry of data, such as clustering, have proven theoretically and empirically invaluable. TDA provides a general framework within which to study topological invariants (shapes) of data, which are more robust to noise and can recover information on higher dimensional features than immediately apparent in the data. A common tool for conducting TDA is persistence homology, which measures the significance of these invariants. Persistence homology has prominent realizations in methods of data visualization, statistics and machine learning. Extending ML with …

How Does Land Cover Classification In Google Earth Engine Compare With Traditional Methods Of Land Cover Classification? What Are The Tradeoffs?, Carlos Sebastian Reyes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The project focuses on comparing land cover classification of traditional methods such as ArcGIS with newer ones such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) as well as discussing any potential tradeoffs. Two studies were performed in both platforms, the first involved analyzing land cover change in the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) region of southern New Mexico, far west Texas, and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. The MRG study focused on urban and agricultural change in the region using two different classification methods. The second study focused on creating a post-hurricane damage assessment (PDA) with the goal of developing an automated method of estimating …

Fingerprint Classification Using Transfer Learning Technique, Aseel H. Aloweiwi

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Fingerprints play a significant role in many sectors. Nowadays, fingerprints are used for identification purposes in criminal investigations. They are also used as an authentication method since they are considered more secure than passwords. Fingerprint sensors are already widely deployed in many devices, including mobile phones and smart locks. Criminals try to compromise biometric fingerprint systems by purposely altering their fingerprints or entering fake ones. Therefore, it is critical to design and develop a highly accurate fingerprint classification. However, some fingerprint datasets are small and not sufficient to train a neural network. Thus, transfer learning is utilized. A large Sokoto …

Machine Learning Approaches To Dribble Hand-Off Action Classification With Sportvu Nba Player Coordinate Data, Dembe Stephanos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recently, strategies of National Basketball Association teams have evolved with the skillsets of players and the emergence of advanced analytics. One of the most effective actions in dynamic offensive strategies in basketball is the dribble hand-off (DHO). This thesis proposes an architecture for a classification pipeline for detecting DHOs in an accurate and automated manner. This pipeline consists of a combination of player tracking data and event labels, a rule set to identify candidate actions, manually reviewing game recordings to label the candidates, and embedding player trajectories into hexbin cell paths before passing the completed training set to the classification …

Data-Driven Recommendation Of Academic Options Based On Personality Traits, Aashish Ghimire

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The choice of academic major and, subsequently, an academic institution has a massive effect on a person’s career. It not only determines their career path but their earning potential, professional happiness, etc. [1] About 40% of people who are admitted to a college do not graduate within six years. Yet, very limited resources are available for students to help make those decisions, and each guidance counselor is responsible for roughly 400 to 900 students across the United States. A tool to help these decisions would benefit students, parents, and guidance counselors.

Various research studies have shown that personality traits affect …

Neural Network Supervised And Reinforcement Learning For Neurological, Diagnostic, And Modeling Problems, Donald Wunsch Iii

Masters Theses

“As the medical world becomes increasingly intertwined with the tech sphere, machine learning on medical datasets and mathematical models becomes an attractive application. This research looks at the predictive capabilities of neural networks and other machine learning algorithms, and assesses the validity of several feature selection strategies to reduce the negative effects of high dataset dimensionality. Our results indicate that several feature selection methods can maintain high validation and test accuracy on classification tasks, with neural networks performing best, for both single class and multi-class classification applications. This research also evaluates a proof-of-concept application of a deep-Q-learning network (DQN) to …

Plant Species Identification In The Wild Based On Images Of Organs, Meghana Kovur

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Image-based plant species identification in the wild is a difficult problem for several reasons. First, the input data is subject to a very high degree of variability because it is captured under fully unconstrained conditions. The same plant species may look very different in different images, while different species can often appear very similar, challenging even the recognition skills of human experts in the field. The large intra-class and small inter-class image variability makes this a fine-grained visual classification problem. One way to cope with this variability and to reduce image background noise is to predict species based on the …

Identification And Classification Of Radio Pulsar Signals Using Machine Learning, Di Pang

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Automated single-pulse search approaches are necessary as ever-increasing amount of observed data makes the manual inspection impractical. Detecting radio pulsars using single-pulse searches, however, is a challenging problem for machine learning because pul- sar signals often vary significantly in brightness, width, and shape and are only detected in a small fraction of observed data.

The research work presented in this dissertation is focused on development of ma- chine learning algorithms and approaches for single-pulse searches in the time domain. Specifically, (1) We developed a two-stage single-pulse search approach, named Single- Pulse Event Group IDentification (SPEGID), which automatically identifies and clas- …

Metric Learning Via Linear Embeddings For Human Motion Recognition, Byoungdoo Kong

Masters Theses

We consider the application of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and dimensionality reduction to the problem of human motion recognition (HMR). The structure of human motion has unique characteristics such as its dynamic and high-dimensional nature. Recent research on human motion recognition uses deep neural networks with multiple layers. Most importantly, large datasets will need to be collected to use such networks to analyze human motion. This process is both time-consuming and expensive since a large motion capture database must be collected and labeled. Despite significant progress having been made in human motion recognition, state-of-the-art algorithms still misclassify actions because of characteristics …

Automatically Classifying Non-Functional Requirements With Feature Extraction And Supervised Machine Learning Techniques, Mahtab Ezzatikarami

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract. Context and Motivation: Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of a system need to be classified into different types such as usability, performance, etc. This would enable stakeholders to ensure the completeness of their work by extracting specific NFRs related to their expertise. Question/Problem: Because of the size and complexity of requirement specification documents, the manual classification of NFRs is time-consuming, labour-intensive, and error-prone. We thus need an automated solution that can provide a highly accurate and efficient categorization of NFRs. Principal ideas/results: In this investigation, using natural language processing and supervised machine learning (SML) techniques, we investigate with feature extraction techniques …

Development And Identification Of Metrics To Predict The Impact Of Dimension Reduction Techniques On Classical Machine Learning Algorithms For Still Highway Images, Wasim Akram Khan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We are witnessing an influx of data - images, texts, video, etc. Their high dimensionality and large volume make it challenging to apply machine learning to obtain actionable insight. This thesis explores several aspects pertaining to dimensional reduction: dimension reduction methods, metrics to measure distortion, image preprocessing, etc. Faster training and inference time on reduced data and smaller models which can be deployed on commodity hardware are a critical advantage of dimension reduction. For this study, classical machine learning methods were explored owing to their solid mathematical foundation and interpretability.

The dataset used is a time series of images from …