Tabular-to-Image Transformations for the Classification of Anonymous Network Traffic Using Deep Residual Networks
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the meteoric rise in anonymous network traffic data, there is a considerable need for effective automation in traffic identification tasks. Though many shallow and deep machine learning network traffic classification solutions have been proposed, they often rely on tabular data, making them unable to detect complex spatial relationships. However, recent advancements in computer processing power have increased the viability of transforming tabular data into images for training deep convolutional neural networks, transforming structured data problems into spatial ones. To identify the most effective methods for representing tabular anonymous network traffic data as images, we compared five deep learning classifiers trained on data from different tabular-to-image algorithms–Image Generator for Tabular Data (IGTD), DeepInsight, vector-of-feature wrapping (normalized and non-normalized), and our newly introduced Binary Image Encoding (BIE) technique in the classification of eight network application types. Furthermore, we examine whether deep residual models trained on tabular-to-image data can outperform the top-performing shallow learner, XGBoost, at classifying anonymous network traffic. We found that ResNet-50, a pre-trained instance of deep residual network, trained on image datasets using IGTD and the novel Binary Image Encoding outperformed XGBoost trained on tabular data. Our ResNet-50 models trained using IGTD and BIE achieved F1-scores of 96.0% and 98.49% respectively, improving on the baseline of 95.1% achieved by XGBoost.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it