Sparse Bayesian Adversarial Learning Using Relevance Vector Machine Ensembles

Yan Zhou, Murat Kantarcioglu, Bhavani M. Thuraisingham

Abstract: Data mining tasks are made more complicated when adversaries attack by modifying malicious data to evade detection. The main challenge lies in finding a robust learning model that is insensitive to unpredictable malicious data distribution. In this paper, we present a sparse relevance vector machine ensemble for adversarial learning. The novelty of our work is the use of individualized kernel parameters to model potential adversarial attacks during model training. We allow the kernel parameters to drift in the direction that minimizes the likelihood of the positive data. This step is interleaved with learning the weights and the weight priors of a relevance vector machine. Our empirical results demonstrate that an ensemble of such relevance vector machine models is more robust to adversarial attacks.