Inherently Interpretable and Uncertainty-Aware Models for Online Learning in Cyber-Security Problems
This addresses trustworthiness issues in high-risk cyber-security applications, though it appears incremental by focusing on scalability improvements to existing AGP models.
The paper tackles the need for interpretable and uncertainty-aware models in online learning for cyber-security by proposing a pipeline using Additive Gaussian Processes to balance predictive performance with transparency, aiming to improve scalability and enable better threat detection and decision-making.
In this paper, we address the critical need for interpretable and uncertainty-aware machine learning models in the context of online learning for high-risk industries, particularly cyber-security. While deep learning and other complex models have demonstrated impressive predictive capabilities, their opacity and lack of uncertainty quantification present significant questions about their trustworthiness. We propose a novel pipeline for online supervised learning problems in cyber-security, that harnesses the inherent interpretability and uncertainty awareness of Additive Gaussian Processes (AGPs) models. Our approach aims to balance predictive performance with transparency while improving the scalability of AGPs, which represents their main drawback, potentially enabling security analysts to better validate threat detection, troubleshoot and reduce false positives, and generally make trustworthy, informed decisions. This work contributes to the growing field of interpretable AI by proposing a class of models that can be significantly beneficial for high-stake decision problems such as the ones typical of the cyber-security domain. The source code is available.