Machine learning algorithms are becoming very efficient in intrusion detection systems with their real time response and adaptive learning process. A robust machine learning model can be deployed for anomaly detection by using a comprehensive dataset with multiple attack types. Nowadays datasets contain many attributes. Such high dimensionality of datasets poses a significant challenge to information extraction in terms of time and space complexity. Moreover, having so many attributes may be a hindrance towards creation of a decision boundary due to noise in the dataset. Large scale data with redundant or insignificant features increases the computational time and often decreases goodness of fit which is a critical issue in cybersecurity. In this research, we have proposed and implemented an efficient feature selection algorithm to filter insignificant variables. Our proposed Dynamic Feature Selector (DFS) uses statistical analysis and feature importance tests to reduce model complexity and improve prediction accuracy. To evaluate DFS, we conducted experiments on two datasets used for cybersecurity research namely Network Security Laboratory (NSL-KDD) and University of New South Wales (UNSW-NB15). In the meta-learning stage, four algorithms were compared namely Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units, Random Forest and a proposed Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) for accuracy estimation. For NSL-KDD, experiments revealed an increment in accuracy from 99.54% to 99.64% while reducing feature size of one-hot encoded features from 123 to 50. In UNSW-NB15 we observed an increase in accuracy from 90.98% to 92.46% while reducing feature size from 196 to 47. The proposed approach is thus able to achieve higher accuracy while significantly lowering number of features required for processing.

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-800X/1/1/11/pdf

Enhancing Machine Learning Prediction in Cybersecurity Using Dynamic Feature Selector

Online advertising has become the backbone of the Internet economy by revolutionizing business marketing. It provides a simple and efficient way for advertisers to display their advertisements to specific individual users, and over the last couple of years has contributed to an explosion in the income stream for several web-based businesses. For example, Google's income from advertising grew 51.6% between 2016 and 2018, to $136.8 billion. This exponential growth in advertising revenue has motivated fraudsters to exploit the weaknesses of the online advertising model to make money, and researchers to discover new security vulnerabilities in the model, to propose countermeasures and to forecast future trends in research. Motivated by these considerations, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the security threats to online advertising systems. We begin by introducing the motivation for online advertising system, explain how it differs from traditional advertising networks, introduce terminology, and define the current online advertising architecture. We then devise a comprehensive taxonomy of attacks on online advertising to raise awareness among researchers about the vulnerabilities of online advertising ecosystem. We discuss the limitations and effectiveness of the countermeasures that have been developed to secure entities in the advertising ecosystem against these attacks. To complete our work, we identify some open issues and outline some possible directions for future research towards improving security methods for online advertising systems.

Online Advertising Security: Issues, Taxonomy, and Future Directions

Feature selection has emerged as a craft, using which we boost the performance of our learning model. Feature or Attribute Selection is a data preprocessing technique, where only the most informative features are considered and given to the predictor. This reduces the computational overhead and improves the correctness of the classifier. Attribute Selection is commonly carried out by applying some filter or by using the performance of the learning model to gauge the quality of the attribute subset. Metric Ranked Feature Inclusion and Accuracy Ranked Feature Inclusion are the two novel hybrid feature selection methods we introduce in this paper. These algorithms follow a two-stage procedure, the first of which is feature ranking, followed by feature subset selection. They differ in the way they rank the features but follow the same subset selection technique. Multiple experiments have been conducted to assess our models. We compare our results with numerous works of the past and validate our models using 12 datasets. From the results, we infer that our algorithms perform better than many existent models.

/pdf/metric-and-accuracy-ranked-feature-inclusion-hybrids-of-2vn407g8xm.pdf

Metric and Accuracy Ranked Feature Inclusion: Hybrids of Filter and Wrapper Feature Selection Approaches

A hybrid machine learning technique for feature optimization in object-based classification of debris-covered glaciers

Online advertising has become the backbone of the Internet economy by revolutionizing business marketing. It provides a simple and efficient way for advertisers to display their advertisements to specific individual users, and over the last couple of years has contributed to an explosion in the income stream for several Web-based businesses. For example, Google’s income from advertising grew 51.6% between 2016 and 2018, to $\$ $ 136.8 billion. This exponential growth in advertising revenue has motivated fraudsters to exploit the weaknesses of the online advertising model to make money, and researchers to discover new security vulnerabilities in the model, to propose countermeasures and to forecast future trends in research. Motivated by these considerations, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the security threats to online advertising systems. We begin by introducing the motivation for online advertising system, explain how it differs from traditional advertising networks, introduce terminology, and define the current online advertising architecture. We then devise a comprehensive taxonomy of attacks on online advertising to raise awareness among researchers about the vulnerabilities of online advertising ecosystem. We discuss the limitations and effectiveness of the countermeasures that have been developed to secure entities in the advertising ecosystem against these attacks. To complete our work, we identify some open issues and outline some possible directions for future research towards improving security methods for online advertising systems.

Click Fraud is a fraudulent act of clicking on pay-per-click advertisements to increase the site’s revenue or to drain revenue from the advertiser. This illegal act has been putting commercial industries in a dilemma for quite some time. These industries think twice before advertising their products on websites and mobile-apps, as many parties try to exploit them. To safely promote their products, there must be an efficient system to detect click fraud. To address this problem, we propose a model called CFXGB (Cascaded Forest and XGBoost). The proposed model, classified under supervised machine learning, is a combination of two learning models used for feature transformation and classification. We showcase its superior performance compared to other related models, and make a comparison with multiple click fraud datasets with varying sizes.

A hybrid and effective learning approach for Click Fraud detection

When seeking to obtain insights from massive amounts of data, supervised classification problems require preprocessing to optimize computation. Among the various steps in preprocessing, feature selection (FS) empowers machine learning methods only to receive relevant data. We propose hybrid FS methods using unsupervised classification, statistical scoring, and a wrapper method. Among our tests using twelve dataset problems, the increase in performance from our novel method against existing FS methods represents an advancement in supervised classification.

G S Thejas

Papers

A hybrid and effective learning approach for Click Fraud detection

Metric and Accuracy Ranked Feature Inclusion: Hybrids of Filter and Wrapper Feature Selection Approaches

COMB: A Hybrid Method for Cross-validated Feature Selection