Data Curation and Quality Assurance for Machine Learning-based Cyber Intrusion Detection

Intrusion detection is an essential task in the cyber threat environment. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have been applied for intrusion detection. However, most of the existing research focuses on the model work but ignores the fact that poor data quality has a direct impact on the performance of a machine learning system. More attention should be paid to the data work when building a machine learning-based intrusion detection system. This article first summarizes existing machine learning-based intrusion detection systems and the datasets used for building these systems. Then the data preparation workflow and quality requirements for intrusion detection are discussed. To figure out how data and models affect machine learning performance, we conducted experiments on 11 HIDS datasets using seven machine learning models and three deep learning models. The experimental results show that BERT and GPT were the best algorithms for HIDS on all of the datasets. However, the performance on different datasets varies, indicating the differences between the data quality of these datasets. We then evaluate the data quality of the 11 datasets based on quality dimensions proposed in this paper to determine the best characteristics that a HIDS dataset should possess in order to yield the best possible result. This research initiates a data quality perspective for researchers and practitioners to improve the performance of machine learning-based intrusion detection.

Fine-tuning Pre-trained Contextual Embeddings for Citation Content Analysis in Scholarly Publication

Citation function and citation sentiment are two essential aspects of citation content analysis (CCA), which are useful for influence analysis, the recommendation of scientific publications. However, existing studies are mostly traditional machine learning methods, although deep learning techniques have also been explored, the improvement of the performance seems not significant due to insufficient training data, which brings difficulties to applications. In this paper, we propose to fine-tune pre-trained contextual embeddings ULMFiT, BERT, and XLNet for the task. Experiments on three public datasets show that our strategy outperforms all the baselines in terms of the F1 score. For citation function identification, the XLNet model achieves 87.2%, 86.90%, and 81.6% on DFKI, UMICH, and TKDE2019 datasets respectively, while it achieves 91.72% and 91.56% on DFKI and UMICH in term of citation sentiment identification. Our method can be used to enhance the influence analysis of scholars and scholarly publications.