Title

Cost-Sensitive Learning for Confidential Access Control

Date of Original Version

2005

Type

Technical Report

Abstract or Table of Contents

It is common to control access to critical information based on the need-to-know principle; The requests for access are authorized only if the content of the requested information is relevant to the requester’s project. We formulate such a dichotomous decision in a machine learning framework. Although the cost for misclassifying examples should be differentiated according to their importance, the best-performing error- minimizing classifiers do not have ways of incorporating the cost information into their learning processes. In order to handle the cost effectively, we apply two cost-sensitive learning methods to the problem of the confidential access control and compare their usefulness with those of error-minimizing classifiers. We devise a new metric for assigning cost to any datasets. From the comparison of the cost-sensitive classifiers with error-minimizing classifiers, we find that costing demonstrates the best performance in that it minimizes the cost for misclassifying the examples and the false positive using a relatively small amount of training data.