Rethinking Benchmarks for Differentially Private Image Classification

We revisit benchmarks for differentially private image classification. We suggest a comprehensive set of benchmarks, allowing researchers to evaluate techniques for differentially private machine learning in a variety of settings, including with and without additional data, in convex settings, and on a variety of qualitatively different datasets. We further test established techniques on these benchmarks in order to see which ideas remain effective in different settings. Finally, we create a publicly available leader board for the community to track progress in differentially private machine learning.

The Role of Adaptive Optimizers for Honest Private Hyperparameter Selection

Hyperparameter optimization is a ubiquitous challenge in machine learning, and the performance of a trained model depends crucially upon their effective selection. While a rich set of tools exist for this purpose, there are currently no practical hyperparameter selection methods under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). We study honest hyperparameter selection for differentially private machine learning, in which the process of hyperparameter tuning is accounted for in the overall privacy budget. To this end, we i) show that standard composition tools outperform more advanced techniques in many settings, ii) empirically and theoretically demonstrate an intrinsic connection between the learning rate and clipping norm hyperparameters, iii) show that adaptive optimizers like DPAdam enjoy a significant advantage in the process of honest hyperparameter tuning, and iv) draw upon novel limiting behaviour of Adam in the DP setting to design a new and more efficient optimizer.

KryptoOracle: A Real-Time Cryptocurrency Price Prediction Platform Using Twitter Sentiments

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are becoming increasingly popular, having been widely used as an exchange medium in areas such as financial transaction and asset transfer verification. However, there has been a lack of solutions that can support real-time price prediction to cope with high currency volatility, handle massive heterogeneous data volumes, including social media sentiments, while supporting fault tolerance and persistence in real time, and provide real-time adaptation of learning algorithms to cope with new price and sentiment data. In this paper we introduce KryptoOracle, a novel real-time and adaptive cryptocurrency price prediction platform based on Twitter sentiments. The integrative and modular platform is based on (i) a Spark-based architecture which handles the large volume of incoming data in a persistent and fault tolerant way; (ii) an approach that supports sentiment analysis which can respond to large amounts of natural language processing queries in real time; and (iii) a predictive method grounded on online learning in which a model adapts its weights to cope with new prices and sentiments. Besides providing an architectural design, the paper also describes the KryptoOracle platform implementation and experimental evaluation. Overall, the proposed platform can help accelerate decision-making, uncover new opportunities and provide more timely insights based on the available and ever-larger financial data volume and variety.

Triclustering of Gene Expression Microarray Data Using Coarse-Grained Parallel Genetic Algorithm

Microarray data analysis is one of the major area of research in the field computational biology. Numerous techniques like clustering, biclustering are often applied to microarray data to extract meaningful outcomes which play key roles in practical healthcare affairs like disease identification, drug discovery etc. But these techniques become obsolete when time as an another factor is considered for evaluation in such data. This problem motivates to use triclustering method on gene expression 3D microarray data. In this article, a new methodology based on coarse-grained parallel genetic approach is proposed to locate meaningful triclusters in gene expression data. The outcomes are quite impressive as they are more effective as compared to traditional state of the art genetic approaches previously applied for triclustering of 3D GCT microarray data.