Data augmentation and transfer learning to classify malware images in a deep learning context

AbstractIn the past few years, malware classification techniques have shifted from shallow traditional machine learning models to deeper neural network architectures. The main benefit of some of these is the ability to work with raw data, guaranteed by their automatic feature extraction capabilities. This results in less technical expertise needed while building the models, thus less initial pre-processing resources. Nevertheless, such advantage comes with its drawbacks, since deep learning models require huge quantities of data in order to generate a model that generalizes well. The amount of data required to train a deep network without overfitting is often unobtainable for malware analysts. We take inspiration from image-based data augmentation techniques and apply a sequence of semantics-preserving syntactic code transformations (obfuscations) to a small dataset of programs to generate a larger dataset. We then design two learning models, a convolutional neural network and a bi-directional long short-term memory, and we train them on images extracted from compiled binaries of the newly generated dataset. Through transfer learning we then take the features learned from the obfuscated binaries and train the models against two state of the art malware datasets, each containing around 10 000 samples. Our models easily achieve up to 98.5% accuracy on the test set, which is on par or better than the present state of the art approaches, thus validating the approach.

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Deep Transfer Learning for Source Code Modeling

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering ◽

10.1142/s0218194020500230 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 30 (05) ◽

pp. 649-668

Author(s):

Yasir Hussain ◽

Zhiqiu Huang ◽

Yu Zhou ◽

Senzhang Wang

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Transfer Learning ◽

Levenshtein Augmentation Improves Performance of SMILES Based Deep-Learning Synthesis Prediction

10.26434/chemrxiv.12562121 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Dean Sumner ◽

Jiazhen He ◽

Amol Thakkar ◽

Ola Engkvist ◽

Esben Jannik Bjerrum

Keyword(s):

Neural Networks ◽

Pattern Recognition ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Recurrent Neural Networks ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Sequence Similarity ◽

Learning Models ◽

Underlying Network

<p>SMILES randomization, a form of data augmentation, has previously been shown to increase the performance of deep learning models compared to non-augmented baselines. Here, we propose a novel data augmentation method we call “Levenshtein augmentation” which considers local SMILES sub-sequence similarity between reactants and their respective products when creating training pairs. The performance of Levenshtein augmentation was tested using two state of the art models - transformer and sequence-to-sequence based recurrent neural networks with attention. Levenshtein augmentation demonstrated an increase performance over non-augmented, and conventionally SMILES randomization augmented data when used for training of baseline models. Furthermore, Levenshtein augmentation seemingly results in what we define as <i>attentional gain </i>– an enhancement in the pattern recognition capabilities of the underlying network to molecular motifs.</p>

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SHEDR: An End-to-End Deep Neural Event Detection and Recommendation Framework for Hyperlocal News Using Social Media

INFORMS Journal on Computing ◽

10.1287/ijoc.2021.1112 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Yuheng Hu ◽

Yili Hong

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Social Media ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Event Detection ◽

Large Scale ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Neural Network Models ◽

Neural Event ◽

End To End

Residents often rely on newspapers and television to gather hyperlocal news for community awareness and engagement. More recently, social media have emerged as an increasingly important source of hyperlocal news. Thus far, the literature on using social media to create desirable societal benefits, such as civic awareness and engagement, is still in its infancy. One key challenge in this research stream is to timely and accurately distill information from noisy social media data streams to community members. In this work, we develop SHEDR (social media–based hyperlocal event detection and recommendation), an end-to-end neural event detection and recommendation framework with a particular use case for Twitter to facilitate residents’ information seeking of hyperlocal events. The key model innovation in SHEDR lies in the design of the hyperlocal event detector and the event recommender. First, we harness the power of two popular deep neural network models, the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM), in a novel joint CNN-LSTM model to characterize spatiotemporal dependencies for capturing unusualness in a region of interest, which is classified as a hyperlocal event. Next, we develop a neural pairwise ranking algorithm for recommending detected hyperlocal events to residents based on their interests. To alleviate the sparsity issue and improve personalization, our algorithm incorporates several types of contextual information covering topic, social, and geographical proximities. We perform comprehensive evaluations based on two large-scale data sets comprising geotagged tweets covering Seattle and Chicago. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches. We show that our hyperlocal event detection and recommendation models consistently and significantly outperform other approaches in terms of precision, recall, and F-1 scores. Summary of Contribution: In this paper, we focus on a novel and important, yet largely underexplored application of computing—how to improve civic engagement in local neighborhoods via local news sharing and consumption based on social media feeds. To address this question, we propose two new computational and data-driven methods: (1) a deep learning–based hyperlocal event detection algorithm that scans spatially and temporally to detect hyperlocal events from geotagged Twitter feeds; and (2) A personalized deep learning–based hyperlocal event recommender system that systematically integrates several contextual cues such as topical, geographical, and social proximity to recommend the detected hyperlocal events to potential users. We conduct a series of experiments to examine our proposed models. The outcomes demonstrate that our algorithms are significantly better than the state-of-the-art models and can provide users with more relevant information about the local neighborhoods that they live in, which in turn may boost their community engagement.

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Covid-19 detection via deep neural network and occlusion sensitivity maps

10.36227/techrxiv.14100890 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Noor Ahmad ◽

Muhammad Aminu ◽

Mohd Halim Mohd Noor

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Deep Neural Network ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Color Images ◽

Fine Tuning ◽

Training Dataset ◽

Learning Approaches ◽

Learning Models ◽

Sensitivity Maps

Deep learning approaches have attracted a lot of attention in the automatic detection of Covid-19 and transfer learning is the most common approach. However, majority of the pre-trained models are trained on color images, which can cause inefficiencies when fine-tuning the models on Covid-19 images which are often grayscale. To address this issue, we propose a deep learning architecture called CovidNet which requires a relatively smaller number of parameters. CovidNet accepts grayscale images as inputs and is suitable for training with limited training dataset. Experimental results show that CovidNet outperforms other state-of-the-art deep learning models for Covid-19 detection.

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Tomato pest classification using deep convolutional neural network with transfer learning, fine tuning and scratch learning

Intelligent Decision Technologies ◽

10.3233/idt-200192 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-10

Author(s):

Gayatri Pattnaik ◽

Vimal K. Shrivastava ◽

K. Parvathi

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Convolutional Neural Network ◽

Transfer Learning ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Deep Convolutional Neural Network ◽

Fine Tuning ◽

Tomato Plants ◽

Random Weights

Pests are major threat to economic growth of a country. Application of pesticide is the easiest way to control the pest infection. However, excessive utilization of pesticide is hazardous to environment. The recent advances in deep learning have paved the way for early detection and improved classification of pest in tomato plants which will benefit the farmers. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of 11 state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models with three configurations: transfers learning, fine-tuning and scratch learning. The training in transfer learning and fine tuning initiates from pre-trained weights whereas random weights are used in case of scratch learning. In addition, the concept of data augmentation has been explored to improve the performance. Our dataset consists of 859 tomato pest images from 10 categories. The results demonstrate that the highest classification accuracy of 94.87% has been achieved in the transfer learning approach by DenseNet201 model with data augmentation.

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Deploying Machine and Deep Learning Models for Efficient Data-Augmented Detection of COVID-19 Infections

Viruses ◽

10.3390/v12070769 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 769 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Ahmed Sedik ◽

Abdullah M Iliyasu ◽

Basma Abd El-Rahiem ◽

Mohammed E. Abdel Samea ◽

Asmaa Abdel-Raheem ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Machine Learning Techniques ◽

Detection Accuracy ◽

Testing Time ◽

Learning Models ◽

Accurate Identification ◽

Infected People ◽

Corona Virus

This generation faces existential threats because of the global assault of the novel Corona virus 2019 (i.e., COVID-19). With more than thirteen million infected and nearly 600000 fatalities in 188 countries/regions, COVID-19 is the worst calamity since the World War II. These misfortunes are traced to various reasons, including late detection of latent or asymptomatic carriers, migration, and inadequate isolation of infected people. This makes detection, containment, and mitigation global priorities to contain exposure via quarantine, lockdowns, work/stay at home, and social distancing that are focused on “flattening the curve”. While medical and healthcare givers are at the frontline in the battle against COVID-19, it is a crusade for all of humanity. Meanwhile, machine and deep learning models have been revolutionary across numerous domains and applications whose potency have been exploited to birth numerous state-of-the-art technologies utilised in disease detection, diagnoses, and treatment. Despite these potentials, machine and, particularly, deep learning models are data sensitive, because their effectiveness depends on availability and reliability of data. The unavailability of such data hinders efforts of engineers and computer scientists to fully contribute to the ongoing assault against COVID-19. Faced with a calamity on one side and absence of reliable data on the other, this study presents two data-augmentation models to enhance learnability of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM)-based deep learning models (DADLMs) and, by doing so, boost the accuracy of COVID-19 detection. Experimental results reveal improvement in terms of accuracy of detection, logarithmic loss, and testing time relative to DLMs devoid of such data augmentation. Furthermore, average increases of 4% to 11% in COVID-19 detection accuracy are reported in favour of the proposed data-augmented deep learning models relative to the machine learning techniques. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is effective in performing a rapid and consistent Corona virus diagnosis that is primarily aimed at assisting clinicians in making accurate identification of the virus.

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Covid-19 detection via deep neural network and occlusion sensitivity maps

10.36227/techrxiv.14100890.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Noor Ahmad ◽

Muhammad Aminu ◽

Mohd Halim Mohd Noor

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Deep Neural Network ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Color Images ◽

Fine Tuning ◽

Training Dataset ◽

Learning Approaches ◽

Learning Models ◽

Sensitivity Maps

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A Tweet Sentiment Classification Approach Using a Hybrid Stacked Ensemble Technique

Information ◽

10.3390/info12090374 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (9) ◽

pp. 374

Author(s):

Babacar Gaye ◽

Dezheng Zhang ◽

Aziguli Wulamu

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Logistic Regression ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Sentiment Analysis ◽

Language Processing ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Accuracy Score ◽

Learning Models ◽

Proposed Model

With the extensive availability of social media platforms, Twitter has become a significant tool for the acquisition of peoples’ views, opinions, attitudes, and emotions towards certain entities. Within this frame of reference, sentiment analysis of tweets has become one of the most fascinating research areas in the field of natural language processing. A variety of techniques have been devised for sentiment analysis, but there is still room for improvement where the accuracy and efficacy of the system are concerned. This study proposes a novel approach that exploits the advantages of the lexical dictionary, machine learning, and deep learning classifiers. We classified the tweets based on the sentiments extracted by TextBlob using a stacked ensemble of three long short-term memory (LSTM) as base classifiers and logistic regression (LR) as a meta classifier. The proposed model proved to be effective and time-saving since it does not require feature extraction, as LSTM extracts features without any human intervention. We also compared our proposed approach with conventional machine learning models such as logistic regression, AdaBoost, and random forest. We also included state-of-the-art deep learning models in comparison with the proposed model. Experiments were conducted on the sentiment140 dataset and were evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score. Empirical results showed that our proposed approach manifested state-of-the-art results by achieving an accuracy score of 99%.

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Quantifying Seagrass Distribution in Coastal Water with Deep Learning Models

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs12101581 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (10) ◽

pp. 1581 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Daniel Perez ◽

Kazi Islam ◽

Victoria Hill ◽

Richard Zimmerman ◽

Blake Schaeffer ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Transfer Learning ◽

Satellite Images ◽

Support Vector ◽

Learning Approach ◽

Learning Models ◽

Learning Techniques ◽

The World ◽

New Locations

Coastal ecosystems are critically affected by seagrass, both economically and ecologically. However, reliable seagrass distribution information is lacking in nearly all parts of the world because of the excessive costs associated with its assessment. In this paper, we develop two deep learning models for automatic seagrass distribution quantification based on 8-band satellite imagery. Specifically, we implemented a deep capsule network (DCN) and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to assess seagrass distribution through regression. The DCN model first determines whether seagrass is presented in the image through classification. Second, if seagrass is presented in the image, it quantifies the seagrass through regression. During training, the regression and classification modules are jointly optimized to achieve end-to-end learning. The CNN model is strictly trained for regression in seagrass and non-seagrass patches. In addition, we propose a transfer learning approach to transfer knowledge in the trained deep models at one location to perform seagrass quantification at a different location. We evaluate the proposed methods in three WorldView-2 satellite images taken from the coastal area in Florida. Experimental results show that the proposed deep DCN and CNN models performed similarly and achieved much better results than a linear regression model and a support vector machine. We also demonstrate that using transfer learning techniques for the quantification of seagrass significantly improved the results as compared to directly applying the deep models to new locations.

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Efficient Pneumonia Detection in Chest Xray Images Using Deep Transfer Learning

Diagnostics ◽

10.3390/diagnostics10060417 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (6) ◽

pp. 417 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Mohammad Farukh Hashmi ◽

Satyarth Katiyar ◽

Avinash G Keskar ◽

Neeraj Dhanraj Bokde ◽

Zong Woo Geem

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Transfer Learning ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

Medical Center ◽

Training Dataset ◽

Test Accuracy ◽

X Rays ◽

Learning Models ◽

Novel Approach ◽

Unseen Data

Pneumonia causes the death of around 700,000 children every year and affects 7% of the global population. Chest X-rays are primarily used for the diagnosis of this disease. However, even for a trained radiologist, it is a challenging task to examine chest X-rays. There is a need to improve the diagnosis accuracy. In this work, an efficient model for the detection of pneumonia trained on digital chest X-ray images is proposed, which could aid the radiologists in their decision making process. A novel approach based on a weighted classifier is introduced, which combines the weighted predictions from the state-of-the-art deep learning models such as ResNet18, Xception, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, and MobileNetV3 in an optimal way. This approach is a supervised learning approach in which the network predicts the result based on the quality of the dataset used. Transfer learning is used to fine-tune the deep learning models to obtain higher training and validation accuracy. Partial data augmentation techniques are employed to increase the training dataset in a balanced way. The proposed weighted classifier is able to outperform all the individual models. Finally, the model is evaluated, not only in terms of test accuracy, but also in the AUC score. The final proposed weighted classifier model is able to achieve a test accuracy of 98.43% and an AUC score of 99.76 on the unseen data from the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center pneumonia dataset. Hence, the proposed model can be used for a quick diagnosis of pneumonia and can aid the radiologists in the diagnosis process.

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