Detecting Anomalies in Advertising Web Traffic with the Use of the Variational Autoencoder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents a neural network model for identifying non-human traffic to a web-site, which is significantly different from visits made by regular users. Such visits are undesirable from the point of view of the website owner as they are not human activity, and therefore do not bring any value, and, what is more, most often involve costs incurred in connection with the handling of advertising. They are made most often by dishonest publishers using special software (bots) to generate profits. Bots are also used in scraping, which is automatic scanning and downloading of website content, which actually is not in the interest of website authors. The model proposed in this work is learnt by data extracted directly from the web browser during website visits. This data is acquired by using a specially prepared JavaScript that monitors the behavior of the user or bot. The appearance of a bot on a website generates parameter values that are significantly different from those collected during typical visits made by human website users. It is not possible to learn more about the software controlling the bots and to know all the data generated by them. Therefore, this paper proposes a variational autoencoder (VAE) neural network model with modifications to detect the occurrence of abnormal parameter values that deviate from data obtained from human users’ Internet traffic. The algorithm works on the basis of a popular autoencoder method for detecting anomalies, however, a number of original improvements have been implemented. In the study we used authentic data extracted from several large online stores.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".