Program verification tools (such as model checkers) are powerful tools for finding errors in programs. Unfortunately, these tools need lots of formal specifications of correct program behavior. Can we really expect programmers to write all of these specifications by hand? This dissertation is about Strauss, a tool I wrote to bring automation to specification-writing. By observing traces of work...

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for mining all frequent inter-transaction patterns. The method consists of two phases. First, we devise two data structures: a dat-list, which stores the item information used to find frequent intertransaction patterns; and an ITP-tree, which stores the discovered frequent inter-transaction patterns. In the second phase, we apply an algorithm, calle...

This paper reports a preliminary investigation of the use of modern data mining tools for mortgage scoring. Using IBM's Intelligent Miner (a data mining toolbox), we built a model of serious delinquency on a sample of data from Mortgage Information Corpo-ration's Loan Performance System, which contains over 20 million loans with a volume of over $1.6 trillion. Currently, two technologies prevai...

The conventional classification task of data mining can be called single-label classification, since there is a single class attribute to be predicted. This paper addresses a more challenging version of the classification task, where there are two or more class attributes to be predicted. We propose a new ant colony algorithm for the multi-label classification task. The new algorithm, called Mu...

In the process of data mining, techniques used, and results gathered, became ethically or even legally questionable due to the concern of the violation of individuals’ privacy when specific information is obtained, manipulated, and disseminated by other entities without an individual’s knowledge or consent. In other words, it is not the concern of what data is being mined, but more so regarding...

Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum’s lack of encryption to develop passive and active attacks on Bitcoin’s mining protocol, with important implications on the privacy, security and even safety of mining equipment owner...

Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum’s lack of encryption to develop passive and active attacks on Bitcoin’s mining protocol, with important implications on the privacy, security and even safety of mining equipment owner...

Discovering functional dependencies (FDs) from an existing relation instance is an important technique in data mining and database design. To date, even the most eecient solutions are exponential in the number of attributes of the relation (n), even when the size of the output is not exponential in n. Lopes et al. developed an algorithm, Dep-Miner, that works well for large n on randomly-genera...

DNA microarrays allow simultaneous measurements of expression levels for a large number of genes across a number of different experimental conditions (samples). The algorithms for mining association rules are used to reveal biologically relevant associations between different genes under different experimental samples. This paper presents a new column-enumeration based method algorithm (abbrevi...

ABC-Miner is a Bayesian classification algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. The algorithm learns Bayesian network Augmented Näıve-Bayes (BAN) classifiers, where the class node is the parent of all the nodes representing the input variables. However, this assumes the existence of a dependency relationship between the class variable and all the input variables, and...