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Quantification of all types of uncertainty helps to establish reliability in any analysis. This research focuses on uncertainty in two attribute levels of wetland classification and creates visualization tools to guide analysis of spatial uncertainty patterns over several scales. A novel variant of confusion matrix analysis compares the Cowardin and Hydrogeomorphic wetland classification systems, identifying areas and types of misclassification for binary and multivariate categories. The specific focus on uncertainty in the paper refers to categorical consistency, that is, agreement between the two classification systems, rather than comparing observed data to ground truth. Consistency is quantified using confusion matrix analysis. Aggregation across progressive focal windows transforms the confusion matrix into a multiscale data pyramid for quick determination of where attribute uncertainty is highly variant, and at what spatial resolutions classification inconsistencies emerge. The focal pyramids summarize precision, recall, and F1 scores to visualize classification differences across spatial scales. Findings show that the F1 scores appear most informative on agreement about wetlands misclassification at both coarse and fine attribute scales. The pyramid organizes multi-scale uncertainty in a single unified framework and can be "sliced" to view individual focal levels of attribute consistency. Results demonstrate how the confusion matrix can be used to quantify the percentage of a study area in which inconsistencies occur reflecting wetland presence and type. The research provides confusion metrics and display tools to focus attention on specific areas of large data sets where attribute uncertainty patterns may be complex, thus reducing land managers' workloads by highlighting areas of uncertainty where field checking might be appropriate, and improving analytics by providing visualization tools to quickly see where such areas occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts a victim's files and demands payment in exchange for the decryption key. It is a rapidly growing and evolving threat that has caused significant damage and disruption to individuals and organizations around the world. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive ransomware classification approach based on the comparison of similarity matrices derived from static, dynamic analysis, and visualization. Our approach involves the use of multiple analysis techniques to extract features from ransomware samples and to generate similarity matrices based on these features. These matrices are then compared using a variety of comparison algorithms to identify similarities and differences between the samples. The resulting similarity scores are then used to classify the samples into different categories, such as families, variants, and versions. We evaluate our approach using a dataset of ransomware samples and demonstrate that it can accurately classify the samples with a high degree of accuracy. One advantage of our approach is the use of visualization, which allows us to classify and cluster large datasets of ransomware in a more intuitive and effective way. In addition, static analysis has the advantage of being fast and accurate, while dynamic analysis allows us to classify and cluster packed ransomware samples. We also compare our approach to other classification approaches based on single analysis techniques and show that our approach outperforms these approaches in terms of classification accuracy. Overall, our study demonstrates the potential of using a comprehensive approach based on the comparison of multiple analysis techniques, including static analysis, dynamic analysis, and visualization, for the accurate and efficient classification of ransomware. It also highlights the importance of considering multiple analysis techniques in the development of effective ransomware classification methods, especially when dealing with large datasets and packed samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing adversarial examples in a black-box threat model injures the original images by introducing visual distortion. In this paper, we propose a novel black-box attack approach that can directly minimize the induced distortion by learning the noise distribution of the adversarial example, assuming only loss-oracle access to the black-box network. To quantify visual distortion, the perceptual distance between the adversarial example and the original image, is introduced in our loss. We first approximate the gradient of the corresponding non-differentiable loss function by sampling noise from the learned noise distribution. Then the distribution is updated using the estimated gradient to reduce visual distortion. The learning continues until an adversarial example is found. We validate the effectiveness of our attack on ImageNet. Our attack results in much lower distortion when compared to the state-of-the-art black-box attacks and achieves 100% success rate on InceptionV3, ResNet50 and VGG16bn. Furthermore, we theoretically prove the convergence of our model. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Alina-1997/visual-distortion-in-attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the task of real-time identification of dynamic events leading to a layer of situational awareness that can become a reality due to increased penetration of phasor measurement units in transmission systems. Two underlying models for this task—data driven and physics based—are explored with examples. Challenges, advantages, and drawbacks of each model are discussed based on the availability of data, attributes of such data, and processing options. Potential applications of the task to improve security of power system protection and anomaly detection in the case of a cyberattack are conceptualized. Some known issues in data communications are discussed vis-a-vis the requirements imposed by the proposed task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social determining factors such as the adverse influence of globalization, supermarket growth, fast unplanned urbanization, sedentary lifestyle, economy, and social position slowly develop behavioral risk factors in humans. Behavioral risk factors such as unhealthy habits, improper diet, and physical inactivity lead to physiological risks, and "obesity/overweight" is one of the consequences. "Obesity and overweight" are one of the major lifestyle diseases that leads to other health conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, diabetes type II, hypertension, and depression. It is not restricted within the age and socio-economic background of human beings. The "World Health Organization" (WHO) has anticipated that 30% of global death will be caused by lifestyle diseases by 2030 and it can be prevented with the appropriate identification of associated risk factors and behavioral intervention plans. Health behavior change should be given priority to avoid life-threatening damages. The primary purpose of this study is not to present a risk prediction model but to provide a review of various machine learning (ML) methods and their execution using available sample health data in a public repository related to lifestyle diseases, such as obesity, CVDs, and diabetes type II. In this study, we targeted people, both male and female, in the age group of >20 and <60, excluding pregnancy and genetic factors. This paper qualifies as a tutorial article on how to use different ML methods to identify potential risk factors of obesity/overweight. Although institutions such as "Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)" and "National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE)" guidelines work to understand the cause and consequences of overweight/obesity, we aimed to utilize the potential of data science to assess the correlated risk factors of obesity/overweight after analyzing the existing datasets available in "Kaggle" and "University of California, Irvine (UCI) database", and to check how the potential risk factors are changing with the change in body-energy imbalance with data-visualization techniques and regression analysis. Analyzing existing obesity/overweight related data using machine learning algorithms did not produce any brand-new risk factors, but it helped us to understand: (a) how are identified risk factors related to weight change and how do we visualize it? (b) what will be the nature of the data (potential monitorable risk factors) to be collected over time to develop our intended eCoach system for the promotion of a healthy lifestyle targeting "obesity and overweight" as a study case in the future? (c) why have we used the existing "Kaggle" and "UCI" datasets for our preliminary study? (d) which classification and regression models are performing better with a corresponding limited volume of the dataset following performance metrics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]