1,720,964 research outputs found
Efficient on-the-fly Web bot detection
Get PDFA large fraction of traffic on present-day Web servers is generated by bots — intelligent agents able to traverse the Web and execute various advanced tasks. Since bots’ activity may raise concerns about server security and performance, many studies have investigated traffic features discriminating bots from human visitors and developed methods for automated traffic classification. Very few previous works, however, aim at identifying bots on-the-fly, trying to classify active sessions as early as possible. This paper proposes a novel method for binary classification of streams of Web server requests in order to label each active session as “bot” or “human”. A machine learning approach has been developed to discover traffic patterns from historical usage data. The model, built on a neural network, is used to classify each incoming HTTP request and a sequential probabilistic analysis approach is then applied to capture relationships between subsequent HTTP requests in an ongoing session to assess the likelihood of the session being generated by a bot or a human, as soon as possible. A performance evaluation study with real server traffic data confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed classifier in discriminating bots from humans at early stages of their visits, leaving very few of them undecided, with very low number of false positives
Feature selection: A multi-objective stochastic optimization approach
No full textThe feature subset task can be cast as a multiobjective discrete optimization problem. In this work, we study the search algorithm component of a feature subset selection method. We propose an algorithm based on the threshold accepting method, extended to the multi-objective framework by an appropriate definition of the acceptance rule. The method is used in the task of identifying relevant subsets of features in a Web bot recognition problem, where automated software agents on the Web are identified by analyzing the stream of HTTP requests to a Web server
A Quantum-Inspired Classifier for Early Web Bot Detection
No full textThis paper introduces a novel approach, inspired by the principles of Quantum Computing, to address web bot detection in terms of real-time classification of an incoming data stream of HTTP request headers, in order to ensure the shortest decision time with the highest accuracy. The proposed approach exploits the analogy between the intrinsic correlation of two or more particles and the dependence of each HTTP request on the preceding ones. Starting from the a-posteriori probability of each request to belong to a particular class, it is possible to assign a Qubit state representing a combination of the aforementioned probabilities for all available observations of the time series. By leveraging the underlying mathematical details of superposition and entanglement on specific subsequences, it is possible to devise a measure of membership to each class, thus enabling the system to take a reliable decision when a sufficient level of confidence is met or to continue with additional observations. The results reported in this paper objectively show the effectiveness of our quantum-inspired algorithm which outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, including our own one based on the Sequential Probability Ratio Test
Online Web Bot Detection Using a Sequential Classification Approach
No full textA significant problem nowadays is detection of Web traffic generated by automatic software agents (Web bots). Some studies have dealt with this task by proposing various approaches to Web traffic classification in order to distinguish the traffic stemming from human users' visits from that generated by bots. Most of previous works addressed the problem of offline bot recognition, based on available information on user sessions completed on a Web server. Very few approaches, however, have been proposed to recognize bots online, before the session completes. This paper proposes a novel approach to binary classification of a multivariate data stream incoming on a Web server, in order to recognize ongoing user sessions as generated by bots or humans. The present approach uses deep neural networks combined with Wald's Sequential Probability Ratio Test to express the relationship between subsequent HTTP requests in an ongoing session and to assess the likelihood of each session being generated by a bot or human before it ends. Experimental results showed the ability of the proposed approach to detect Web bots online with high performance scores and a small number of false negatives, as evidenced by the Recall index, minimizing the impact on human visitors. Another valuable indicator is the speed of decision: the present method allows very quick classification of nearly all sessions, leaving only very few of them undecided
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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