Decoding Market Emotion from Blockchain Activity: A Data-Driven Sentiment Classifier

The growing use of Bitcoin as a decentralized digital asset and investment tool has sparked strong interest in understanding its market behavior. This study presents a new approach to analyze Bitcoin market sentiment by combining on-chain and financial data with social media posts. Unlike models that aim to predict prices, this work focuses on explaining market sentiment using blockchain transactions, historical price data of Bitcoin, and daily Twitter sentiment classifications. The method merges sentiment trends with on-chain and financial metrics, normalized into a dataset for detailed market analysis. Multiple machine learning models were tested using cross-validation, with Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) emerging as the most reliable model for classifying sentiment, achieving an average F1-score of about 0.84. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), a game theory-based method for model interpretability, was used to quantify the contribution of on-chain features to the model's predictions, improving transparency. The results indicate that this data combination yields meaningful predictive signals and insights, supporting data-driven cryptocurrency analysis and future improvements with deep learning.

Improving Network Anomaly Detection via Choquet-Integral-Based Feature Aggregation

This work investigates a generalized Choquet-integral-based feature aggregation framework to improve anomaly detection in high-dimensional network traffic data. The approach combines adaptive weighting with incremental feature selection to address feature redundancy. Using Random Forest and XGBoost classifiers, we evaluate models trained with both raw and Choquet-aggregated features under varying feature subset sizes. The proposed aggregation achieves up to $7\%$ higher accuracy while reducing data volume by $77.5\%$ (from $214$~MB to $48$~MB), without degrading precision and recall. Results averaged over multiple stratified repetitions indicate that Choquet-based aggregation yields statistically significant gains ($p < 0.05$) in scenarios with limited feature availability, highlighting its suitability for real-time intrusion detection under bandwidth and feature-availability constraints.

On the Impact of Entropy-based Features

Network anomaly detection is increasingly challenging due to the growing diversity and variability of traffic patterns, which are not always well captured by traditional statistical features. In this work, we explore the use of entropy as an additional feature to support supervised network traffic classification. The main idea is to use entropy to represent variability in selected traffic attributes, complementing conventional descriptors rather than replacing them. We integrate the entropy-based feature into a standard machine learning pipeline and evaluate its impact through a direct comparison between models trained with and without this feature. Experiments conducted on a public intrusion detection dataset show consistent improvements in classification performance, while the additional computational cost remains low. The analysis of confusion matrices indicates a reduction in misclassifications, especially in traffic scenarios with higher variability. Overall, the results suggest that entropy-based features offer a simple and practical way to enhance existing anomaly detection pipelines. This approach is particularly attractive in settings where lightweight feature engineering and interpretability are important, making entropy a useful complement to commonly used traffic features.

Federated Learning under Attack: Improving Gradient Inversion for Batch of Images

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a machine learning approach able to preserve the privacy of user's data. Applying FL, clients train machine learning models on a local dataset and a central server aggregates the learned parameters coming from the clients, training a global machine learning model without sharing user's data. However, the state-of-the-art shows several approaches to promote attacks on FL systems. For instance, inverting or leaking gradient attacks can find, with high precision, the local dataset used during the training phase of the FL. This paper presents an approach, called Deep Leakage from Gradients with Feedback Blending (DLG-FB), which is able to improve the inverting gradient attack, considering the spatial correlation that typically exists in batches of images. The performed evaluation shows an improvement of 19.18% and 48,82% in terms of attack success rate and the number of iterations per attacked image, respectively.