Trustable and Automated Machine Learning Running with Blockchain and Its Applications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework for trustable, automated machine learning, introducing a compact model deployment method and synthetic data generation to improve fraud detection with limited data.

Contribution

It introduces a server-based training approach with binary model storage and a synthetic data generation method for enhanced fraud detection.

Findings

Binary model format enables deployment on edge devices

Synthetic data improves fraud detection accuracy

Framework enhances trust and automation in machine learning

Abstract

Machine learning algorithms learn from data and use data from databases that are mutable; therefore, the data and the results of machine learning cannot be fully trusted. Also, the machine learning process is often difficult to automate. A unified analytical framework for trustable machine learning has been presented in the literature. It proposed building a trustable machine learning system by using blockchain technology, which can store data in a permanent and immutable way. In addition, smart contracts on blockchain are used to automate the machine learning process. In the proposed framework, a core machine learning algorithm can have three implementations: server layer implementation, streaming layer implementation, and smart contract implementation. However, there are still open questions. First, the streaming layer usually deploys on edge devices and therefore has limited memory and computing power. How can we run machine learning on the streaming layer? Second, most data that are stored on blockchain are financial transactions, for which fraud detection is often needed. However, in some applications, training data are hard to obtain. Can we build good machine learning models to do fraud detection with limited training data? These questions motivated this paper; which makes two contributions. First, it proposes training a machine learning model on the server layer and saving the model with a special binary data format. Then, the streaming layer can take this blob of binary data as input and score incoming data online. The blob of binary data is very compact and can be deployed on edge devices. Second, the paper presents a new method of synthetic data generation that can enrich the training data set. Experiments show that this synthetic data generation is very effective in applications such as fraud detection in financial data.