Biblio

This paper discusses securities and cryptocurrency trading using artificial intelligence (AI) in the sense that it focuses on performing Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on selected technical indicators before proceeding to modelling, and then to develop more practical models by introducing new reward loss function that maximizes the returns during training phase. The results of EDA reveal that the complex patterns within the data can be better captured by discriminative classification models and this was endorsed by performing back-testing on two securities using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Random Forests (RF) as discriminative models against their counterpart Na\"ıve Bayes as a generative model. To enhance the learning process, the new reward loss function is utilized to retrain the ANN with testing on AAPL, IBM, BRENT CRUDE and BTC using auto-trading strategy that serves as the intelligent unit, and the results indicate this loss superiorly outperforms the conventional cross-entropy used in predictive models. The overall results of this work suggest that there should be larger focus on EDA and more practical losses in the research of machine learning modelling for stock market prediction applications.

Despite widespread use of commercial anti-virus products, the number of malicious files detected on home and corporate computers continues to increase at a significant rate. Recently, anti-virus companies have started investing in machine learning solutions to augment signatures manually designed by analysts. A malicious file's determination is often represented as a hierarchical structure consisting of a type (e.g. Worm, Backdoor), a platform (e.g. Win32, Win64), a family (e.g. Rbot, Rugrat) and a family variant (e.g. A, B). While there has been substantial research in automated malware classification, the aforementioned hierarchical structure, which can provide additional information to the classification models, has been ignored. In this paper, we propose the novel idea and study the performance of employing hierarchical learning algorithms for automated classification of malicious files. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort which incorporates the hierarchical structure of the malware label in its automated classification and in the security domain, in general. It is important to note that our method does not require any additional effort by analysts because they typically assign these hierarchical labels today. Our empirical results on a real world, industrial-scale malware dataset of 3.6 million files demonstrate that incorporation of the label hierarchy achieves a significant reduction of 33.1% in the binary error rate as compared to a non-hierarchical classifier which is traditionally used in such problems.