DOI: https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2018.76
Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/1871
Date of Award
6-2018
Degree Name
MS in Computer Science
Department/Program
Computer Science
Advisor
Lubomir Stanchev
Abstract
One-class classification is a specialized form of classification from the field of machine learning. Traditional classification attempts to assign unknowns to known classes, but cannot handle novel unknowns that do not belong to any of the known classes. One-class classification seeks to identify these outliers, while still correctly assigning unknowns to classes appropriately. One-class classification is applied here to the field of nuclear forensics, which is the study and analysis of nuclear material for the purpose of nuclear incident investigations. Nuclear forensics data poses an interesting challenge because false positive identification can prove costly and data is often small, high-dimensional, and sparse, which is problematic for most machine learning approaches. A web application is built using the R programming language and the shiny framework that incorporates N-SLOPE: a machine learning ensemble. N-SLOPE combines five existing one-class classifiers with a novel one-class classifier introduced here and uses ensemble learning techniques to combine output. N-SLOPE is validated on three distinct data sets: Iris, Obsidian, and Galaxy Serpent 3, which is an enhanced version of a recent international nuclear forensics exercise. N-SLOPE achieves high classification accuracy on each data set of 100%, 83.33%, and 83.33%, respectively, while minimizing false positive detection rate to 0% across the board and correctly detecting every single novel unknown from each data set. N-SLOPE is shown to be a useful and powerful tool to aid in nuclear forensic investigations.