Firenze: Model Evaluation Using Weak Signals
This addresses the slow adoption of ML in security by providing a faster, interpretable evaluation method, though it is incremental as it builds on existing domain expertise and statistical testing.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating machine learning models in security where labels are noisy or limited, by introducing Firenze, a framework that uses domain expertise encoded as markers to estimate real-world performance, showing effectiveness on malware and DNS reputation datasets.
Data labels in the security field are frequently noisy, limited, or biased towards a subset of the population. As a result, commonplace evaluation methods such as accuracy, precision and recall metrics, or analysis of performance curves computed from labeled datasets do not provide sufficient confidence in the real-world performance of a machine learning (ML) model. This has slowed the adoption of machine learning in the field. In the industry today, we rely on domain expertise and lengthy manual evaluation to build this confidence before shipping a new model for security applications. In this paper, we introduce Firenze, a novel framework for comparative evaluation of ML models' performance using domain expertise, encoded into scalable functions called markers. We show that markers computed and combined over select subsets of samples called regions of interest can provide a robust estimate of their real-world performances. Critically, we use statistical hypothesis testing to ensure that observed differences-and therefore conclusions emerging from our framework-are more prominent than that observable from the noise alone. Using simulations and two real-world datasets for malware and domain-name-service reputation detection, we illustrate our approach's effectiveness, limitations, and insights. Taken together, we propose Firenze as a resource for fast, interpretable, and collaborative model development and evaluation by mixed teams of researchers, domain experts, and business owners.