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The continuous malicious software (malware) attacks on smartphones pose a serious threat to the security of users, especially the dominant platform Android. Data-driven methods based on machine learning algorithms are a promising way to defend against that. In this paper, we explore the limitations of this kind of methods in improving the performance of malware detection, e.g., considering each feature in isolation and relying on balanced class data, and propose a multi-model ensemble framework MEFDroid by combining individual predictors, where hybrid deep learning based feature extraction methods are adopted to learn meaningful features from raw data. Besides, a novel fusion scheme is exploited to fuse multi-level representations and mine their correlations to maximize the utilization of original information. To evaluate the effectiveness of the MEFDroid framework, we conduct a step-by-step model justification experiment to investigate how the proposed algorithms (i.e., ESAES, EDAES and EDAFS) enhance the malware detection performance gradually. We also compare the proposed algorithms with classical machine learning methods, conventional sampling solutions for the imbalance problem. Besides, we investigate the reliability of our proposed methods using another public dataset. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the target model EDAFS in MEFDroid outperforms others in terms of most metrics, which means that it is an effective alternative solution to detect Android malware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the existing machine learning algorithms, both supervised and unsupervised, depend on the quality of the input characteristics to generate a good model. The amount of these variables is also important, since performance tends to decline as the input dimensionality increases, hence the interest in using feature fusion techniques, able to produce feature sets that are more compact and higher level. A plethora of procedures to fuse original variables for producing new ones has been developed in the past decades. The most basic ones use linear combinations of the original variables, such as PCA ( Principal Component Analysis ) and LDA ( Linear Discriminant Analysis ), while others find manifold embeddings of lower dimensionality based on non-linear combinations, such as Isomap or LLE ( Linear Locally Embedding ) techniques. More recently, autoencoders (AEs) have emerged as an alternative to manifold learning for conducting nonlinear feature fusion. Dozens of AE models have been proposed lately, each with its own specific traits. Although many of them can be used to generate reduced feature sets through the fusion of the original ones, there also AEs designed with other applications in mind. The goal of this paper is to provide the reader with a broad view of what an AE is, how they are used for feature fusion, a taxonomy gathering a broad range of models, and how they relate to other classical techniques. In addition, a set of didactic guidelines on how to choose the proper AE for a given task is supplied, together with a discussion of the software tools available. Finally, two case studies illustrate the usage of AEs with datasets of handwritten digits and breast cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 3 layer neural networks outperform other ML algorithms in automated assessments. • In subjective assignments, deep neural networks can improve score prediction. • Word embeddings and linguistic feature results in more precise text mining models. • Extraction and selection of appropriate features can improve results. Machine learning (ML) has recently gained popularity in a variety of domains for automating tasks. This has also been used in the evaluation of student responses/ assignments. This paper presents a qualitatively enhanced methodology for automated score prediction of subjective assignments. To consider all the major aspects of a human grader, 21 linguistic features related to syntactical, grammatical, sentimental, and readability are analyzed from the assignments. This study makes use of the ASAP competition dataset from Kaggle. The evaluation metric used is Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), which measures the agreement between the human graded score and the predicted score. The effect of appropriate feature selection has been observed using Mutual Information Regression. Four ML algorithms are investigated on identified linguistic features. 3 Layer Neural Network with feature selection performed well among all chosen ML algorithms with average QWK of 0.678. To include the benefits of deep learning, a new hybrid model (LF-BiLSTM-att-FS) is proposed that combines a higher level deep neural network (DNN) with the selected features. Pre-trained Glove embedding is used to include contextual information of the text. The proposed model results demonstrated an improvement in overall accuracy, with an average QWK value of 0.768. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]