Utilizing the concept of hypothesis margins to measure the quality of a set of features has been a growing line of research in the last decade. However, most previous algorithms have been developed under the large hypothesis margin principles of the 1-NN algorithm, such as Simba. Little attention has been paid so far to exploiting the hypothesis margins of boosting to evaluate features. Boosting is well known to maximize the training examples' hypothesis margins, in particular, the average margins which are known to be the first statistics that considers the whole margin distribution. In this paper, we describe how to utilize the training examples' mean margins of boosting to select features. A weight criterion, termed Margin Fraction (MF), is assigned to each feature that contributes to the average margin distribution combined in the final output produced by boosting. Applying the idea of MF to a sequential backward selection method, a new embedded selection algorithm is proposed, called SBS-MF. Experimentation is carried out using different data sets, which compares the proposed SBS-MF with two boosting based feature selection approaches, as well as to Simba. The results show that SBS-MF is effective in most of the cases.

In this paper, we develop an automated and adaptive framework that aims to move active data to high performance storage tiers and inactive data to low cost/high capacity storage tiers by learning patterns of the storage workloads. The framework proposed is designed using efficient Markov chain correlation based clustering method (MCC), which can quickly predict or detect any changes in the current workload based on what the system has experienced before. The workload data is first normalized and Markov chains are constructed from the dynamics of the IO loads of the data storage units. Based on the correlation of one-step Markov chain transition probabilities k-means method is employed to group the storage units that have similar behavior at each point. Such framework can then easily be incorporated in various resource management policies that aim at enhancing performance, reliability, availability. The predictive nature of the model, particularly makes a storage system both faster and lower-cost at the same time, because it only uses high performance tiers when needed, and uses low cost/high capacity tiers when possible.

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are continuously evolving, with the goal of improving the security of computer infrastructures. However, one of the most significant challenges in this area is the poor detection rate, due to the presence of excessive features in a data set whose class distributions are imbalanced. Despite the relatively long existence and the promising nature of feature selection methods, most of them fail to account for imbalance class distributions, particularly, for intrusion data, leading to poor predictions for minority class samples. In this paper, we propose a new feature selection algorithm to enhance the accuracy of IDS of virtual server environments. Our algorithm assigns weights to subsets of features according to the maximized area under the ROC curve (AUC) margin it induces during the boosting process over the minority and the majority examples. The best subset of features is then selected by a greedy search strategy. The empirical experiments are carried out on multiple intrusion data sets using different commercial virtual appliances and real malwares.

Virtualization is becoming an increasingly popular service hosting platform. Recently, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) which utilize virtualization have been introduced. One particular challenge present in current virtualization-based IDS systems is considered in this paper. IDS systems are commonly faced with high-dimensionality imbalanced data. Improved feature selection methods are needed to achieve more accurate detection when presented with imbalanced data. These methods must select the right set of features which will lead to a lower number of false alarms and higher correct detection rates. In this paper we propose a new Boosting-based feature selection that evaluates the relative importance of individual features using the fractional absolute confidence that Boosting produces. Our approach accounts for the sample distributions by optimizing for the area under the Receive Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve (i.e., Area Under the Curve(AUC)). Empirical results on different commercial virtual appliances and malwares indicate that proper input feature selection is key if we want an effective virtualization-based IDS that is lightweight, efficient and effective.