Is meaningful to use word2vec represent a hash value? - neural-network

I have an execution path containing a nondeterministic length of sequence of packets. For example, /A/B/C/D/E, /A/E/G/B, etc, where the capital characters are packets represented by hash value. Is it meaningful if I represent each packets using word2vec?

Word2Vec relies on predictive co-occurrences to achieve its usefully-dense embedded representations.
If you're using a strong hash that turns a single bit's difference in the packets into a totally different token, that would likely be unhelpful 'noise' to Word2Vec.
If it's a somewhat-semantic hash, that serves to give similar-packets similar tokens, it may be appropriate and helpful to the Word2Vec algorithm.
When you mention your end-goal is to "predict whether this path leads to a wrong system global state", I wonder if Word2Vec word-vectors will be an appropriate tool. Word2Vec doesn't have much depth/recurrence/series-statefulness in its model; it is unlikely to capture much knowledge about an underlying "state machine" or "illegal states", although it might help position a 'packet' to be similar to others based on similar predecessor/successor packets (as a helpful feed into some other more stateful analysis).

Related

Imbalanced multiclass classification using company names

I have this classification scenario below in which Im getting a very low F1, precision, recall and other metrics.
Target is multiclass (about ~200 classes) which is highly imbalanced
I only use company names as classifier (mostly 1-2 words which have max of 8 words), no other fields (like description, etc.)
Training data ~ 100k+ records
Preprocessing: numeric and special characters and stopwords removal
I have very low resources for processing (thats why when I try to use oversampling techniques like smote, distance_smote for multiclass, etc., I always get memory error)
Tried using different vectorization/embedding/tokenizer like word2vec, tfidf, fasttext, bert, roberta, etc. but to no avail
Tried using (and fine-tuning) different algorithms (networks, svm, trees, boosting, etc.) but also getting low scores.
I also did cost-sensitive learning (using class weights) but it only decreased my scores.
Tried all options that I know but scores are not increasing. Can you recommend other options here or do you think any part of the process that may be wrong/discarded? Thank you!
Distribution of target labels:
Sample observations
There is essentially no way to know that 'Exxon' is an oil company, and 'Apple' a computer company, and 'McDonalds' a fast-food chain, just from their company names.
Even if you have a list of every other company in the world, by name and type, that's not enough to make the deduction for these last 3. Only other outside info – like a few sentences about them, or other data – could classify them.
In fact, while company names sometimes describe their exact field-of-commerce, often they're totally arbitrary, as that gives them more freedom to range over many products/services, or create their own unique associations with the name (aka branding).
So I strongly suspect your (unshown) names & (unshown) labels are just too arbitrary for the data you're using to get very good at the task you're attempting.
Is there a real-world situation where someone will only have a company name – no other info, or research options – and benefit from correctly guessing the class? If so, more specifics about the situation might help generate more specific tactical recommendations. But mainly such recommendations will be: get richer data about the targets of the classification.
You might squeeze a little more out of vague trends in corporate naming via better preprocessing/feature-extraction. You may want to keep numbers, special-characters, & punctuation in some form, as they might include extra slight hints. Using subwords (character n-grams) might also reveal some shared word-roots used even in made-up names.

evaluation NLP classifier with annotated data

if we want to evaluate a classifier of NLP application with data that are annotated with two annotators, and they are not completely agreed on the annotation, how is the procedure?
That is, if we should compare the classifier output with just the portion of data that annotators agreed on? or just one of the annotator data? or the both of them separately and then compute the average?
Taking the majority vote between annotators is common. Throwing out disagreements is also done.
Here's a blog post on the subject:
Suppose we have a bunch of annotators and we don’t have perfect agreement on items. What do we do? Well, in practice, machine learning evals tend to either (1) throw away the examples without agreement (e.g., the RTE evals, some biocreative named entity evals, etc.), or (2) go with the majority label (everything else I know of). Either way, we are throwing away a huge amount of information by reducing the label to artificial certainty. You can see this pretty easily with simulations, and Raykar et al. showed it with real data.
What's right for you depends heavily on your data and how the annotators disagree; for starters, why not use only items they agree on and see what then compare the model to the ones they didn't agree on?

How to implement deterministic single threaded network simulation

I read about how FoundationDB does its network testing/simulation here: http://www.slideshare.net/FoundationDB/deterministic-simulation-testing
I would like to implement something very similar, but cannot figure out how they actually did implement it. How would one go about writing, for example, a C++ class that does what they do. Is it possible to do the kind of simulation they do without doing any code generation (as they presumeably do)?
Also: How can a simulation be repeated, if it contains random events?? Each time the simulation would require to choose a new random value and thus be not the same run as the one before. Maybe I am missing something here...hope somebody can shed a bit of light on the matter.
You can find a little bit more detail in the talk that went along with those slides here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc
As for the determinism question, you're right that a simulation cannot be repeated exactly unless all possible sources of randomness and other non-determinism are carefully controlled. To that end:
(1) Generate all random numbers from a PRNG that you seed with a known value.
(2) Avoid any sort of branching or conditionals based on facts about the world which you don't control (e.g. the time of day, the load on the machine, etc.), or if you can't help that, then pseudo-randomly simulate those things too.
(3) Ensure that whatever mechanism you pick for concurrency has a mode in which it can guarantee a deterministic execution order.
Since it's easy to mess all those things up, you'll also want to have a way of checking whether determinism has been violated.
All of this is covered in greater detail in the talk that I linked above.
In the sims I've built the biggest issue with repeatability ends up being proper seed management (as per the previous answer). You want your simulations to give different results only when you supply a different seed to your random number generators than before.
After that the biggest issue I've seen seems tends to be making sure you don't iterate over collections with nondeterministic ordering. For instance, in Java, you'd use a LinkedHashMap instead of a HashMap.

Chance on generating 2 equal hashes based on time()?

Question is pretty simple, but I couldn't find an answer for this one... Basicly, my application is generating filenames with md5(time());.
What are the chances, if any, that using this technique, I'll have 2 equal results?
P.S. Since my question title says hashes not exact hash, what are the chances, if any, again, of generating equal results for each type of hashes sha1();, sha512(); etc.?
Thanks in advance!
My estimation is it is unsafe due to possible changes in time by humans and other processes such as NTP which FrankH has kindly noted. I highly recommend using a cryptographically secure RNG (random number generator) if your framework allows.
Equal results are unlikely to result from this, you can simply validate that yourself by checking the uniqueness of md5(0) ... md5(INT32_MAX) since that's the total range of a time_t. I don't think there are collisions in that input space for any of the hashes you've named.
Predictable results is another matter, though. By choosing time() as you input supplier, you restrict yourself to, well, one unique hash per second, no more than 86400 per day, ...

a simple/practical example of fuzzy c-means algorithm

I am writing my master thesis on the subject of dynamic keystroke authentication. To support ongoing research, I am writing code to test out different methods of feature extraction and feature matching.
My current simple approach just checks if the reference password keycodes matches the currently typed in keycodes and also checks if the keypress times (dwell) and the key-to-key times (flight) are the same as reference times +/- 100ms (tolerance). This is of course very limited and I want to extend it with some sort of fuzzy c-means pattern matching.
For each key the features look like: keycode, dwelltime, flighttime (first flighttime is always 0).
Obviously the keycodes can be taken out of the fuzzy algorithm because they have to be exactly the same.
In this context, how would a practical implementation of fuzzy c-means look like?
Generally, you would do the following:
Determine how many clusters you want (2? "Authentic" and "Fake"?)
Determine what elements you want to cluster (individual keystrokes? login attempts?)
Determine what your feature vectors will look like (dwell time, flight time?)
Determine what distance metric you will be using (how will you measure the distance of each sample from each cluster?)
Create exemplar training data for each cluster type (what does an authentic login look like?)
Run the FCM algorithm on the training data to generate the clusters
To create the membership vector for any given login attempt sample, run it through the FCM algorithm using the clusters you found in step 6
Use the resulting membership vector to determine (based on some threshold criteria) whether the login attempt is authentic
I'm not an expert, but this seems like an odd approach to determining whether a login attempt is authentic or not. I've seen FCM used for pattern recognition (eg. which facial expression am I making?), which makes sense because you're dealing with several categories (eg. happy, sad, angry, etc...) with defining characteristics. In your case, you really only have one category (authentic) with defining characteristics. Non-authentic keystrokes are simply "not like" authentic keystrokes, so they won't cluster.
Perhaps I am missing something?
I don't think you really want to do clustering here. You might want to do some proper fuzzy matching though instead of just allowing some delta on each value.
For clustering, you need to have many data points. Additionally, you'd need to know the proper number of means you need.
But what are these multiple objects meant to be? You have one data point for every keycode. You don't want to have the user type the password 100 times to see if he can do it consistently. And even then, what do you expect the clusters to be? You already know which keycode comes at which position, you don't want to find out what keycodes the user use for his password...
Sorry, I really don't see any clustering here. The term "fuzzy" seems to have mislead you to this clustering algorithm. Try "fuzzy logic" instead.