Click Fraud and Bot Net Detection

Kitts, B., Zhang, J., Wu, G., Brandi, W., Beasley, J., Morrill, K., Ettedgui, J., Siddhartha, S., Yuan, H., Gao, F., Azo, P., Mahato, R. (2014), Click Fraud Detection: Adversarial Pattern Recognition over 5 Years at Microsoft, in Mahmoud Abou-Nasr, Robert Stahlbock, Stefan Lessmann, Gary M. Weiss (eds), Annals of Information Systems, Special issue on Real World Data Mining Applications, Volume 17, 2015, pp 181-201, Springer.

Kitts, B. and Potter, A. (2019), Efficient Adversarial Chaff Generation for Challenge-Response Authentication Over Unsecure Networks, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), July 1-3, 2019, Shenzhen, China, IEEE Press. [video]

Kitts, B., Zhang, J., Wu, G., Mahato, R. (2013), Click Fraud Botnet Detection by Calculating Mix Adjusted Traffic Value: A Method for De-Cloaking Click Fraud Attacks that is Resistant to Spoofing, Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), IEEE Press.

Kitts, B., Zhang, J., Roux, A., Mills, R. (2013), Click Fraud Detection with Bot Signatures, Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), IEEE Press.

Brandi., W., Kitts, B., Mahato, R., Zhang, J. (2013), Armored Ads, Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), IEEE Press.

Kitts, B. Laxminarayan, P. and LeBlanc, B. (2005) Cooperative Strategies for Keyword Auctions, First International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications, Wales. September 2005.

Kitts, B. LeBlanc, B., Laxminarayan, P. (2005), Click Fraud, Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Vol. 32, Iss. 2, Dec 2005/Jan 2006 [Website version]

Ad Servers

Kitts, B., Krishnan, M., Yadav, I., Zeng, Y., Badeau, G., Potter, A., Tolkachov, S., Thornburg, E., Reddy-Janga, S. (2017), Ad Serving with Multiple KPIs, Proceedings of the Twenty-Third SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2017), August 12-17, 2017, Halifax, CA. ACM Press. [see also 3 minute video of the paper]

Kitts, B. (2013), The Making of a Large-Scale Ad Server, in Data Mining Case Studies Workshop and Practice Prize 5, Proceedings of the IEEE Thirteenth International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW 2013), December, Dallas, TX, IEEE Press.

Wu, G. and Kitts, B. (2008), Experimental comparison of scalable online ad serving. Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2008), August 24, pp. 1008-1015, ACM Press.

Television

Kitts, B., Au, D. (2014), A Comparison of Algorithms for TV Ad Targeting, Proceedings of the Fourteenth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW 2014).

Kitts, B., Au, D., Ulger, S. (2014), How Well Does Addressable Targeting Work on Television?, First Workshop on Recommender Systems for Television and online Video (RecSysTV), held at the Eighth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2014, Foster City, Silicon Valley, USA from 6th-10th October 2014

Kitts, B., Au, D., Borchardt, J. (2014), Sell-Side TV Ad Optimization, First Workshop on Recommender Systems for Television and online Video (RecSysTV), held at the Eighth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2014, Foster City, Silicon Valley, USA from 6th-10th October 2014

Kitts, B., Bardaro, M., Au, D., Lee, A., Lee, S., Borchardt, J., Schwartz, C., Sobieski, J., Wadsworth-Drake, J. (2014), Can Television Advertising Impact Be Measured on the Web? Web Spike Response as a Possible Conversion Tracking System for Television, Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Data Mining for Online Advertising, Aug 24, 2014, New York City, held at the 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Aug 24-27, 2014, New York City.

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B. (2013), A High-Dimensional Set Top Box Ad Targeting Algorithm including Experimental Comparisons to Traditional TV Algorithms, Proceedings of the Thirteenth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2013), December, Dallas, TX, IEEE Press.

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B., Borchardt, J., Powter A. and Otis, T. (2013), Demand Finder: Set Top Box Television Ad Targeting using a Novel Interactive Data Visualization System, Proceedings of the Thirteenth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW 2013), December, Dallas, TX, IEEE Press. [word version]

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B. (2013), Real-Time Television ROI Tracking Using Mirrored Experimental Designs, Trends and Applications in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 7867, pp. 95-108, Springer-Verlag.

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B. (2012), Tectonic Shifts in Television Advertising, Proceedings of the Twelfth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops 2012 (ICDMW 2012), Vol. 916. IEEE Press.

Wei, L. and Kitts, B. (2010), "Analyzing Direct Marketing Data with R", useR!: The R User Conference 2010, campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, July 20-23, 2010. [external]

Kitts, B., Wei, L., Au, D., Powter, A., Burdick, B. (2010), “Attribution of Conversion Events to Multi-Channel Media”, Proceedings of the Tenth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2010), December 14-17, 2010. IEEE Press.

Kitts, B., Wei, L., Au, D., Zlomek, S., Brooks, R., Burdick, B. (2010) “Targeting Television Audiences using Demographic Similarity”, Applications of Data Mining and Modeling in Government and Industry Workshop (ADMMGI2010) in Workshop Proceedings of the Tenth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDMW 2010), IEEE Press.

Auctions

Efficient deep distribution network for bid shading in First-Price Auctions

MEOW: A Space-Efficient Non-Parametric Bid Shading Algorithm

Bid Shading by Win-Rate Estimation and Surplus Maximization, AdKDD 2020 Workshop, 26th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2020), August 22, 2020, San Diego, CA. [video]

Bid Shading in the Brave New World of First Price Auctions
Lookahead Budget Allocation in Online Bidding

Online Advertising

Kitts, B., McCoy, N. and van den Berg, M. (2019), The Future of Online Advertising: Thoughts on Emerging Issues in Privacy, Information Bubbles and Disinformation, IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society 2019, November 15-16, 2019, Boston, MA. IEEE Press. [Video from early version of talk]

Kitts, B., Badeau, G., Potter, A., Wei, L., Tolkachov, S., Thornburg, E., Shamsi, D. (2016), Demographic Prediction of Web Requests from Labeled Aggregate Data, Workshop on Ad Targeting at Scale (TargetAd2016), 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM2016), February 22-25, 2016, San Francisco, CA. [external]

Jansen, B., Flaherty, T., Baeza-Yates, R., Hunter, L., Kitts, B., Murphy, J. (2009), The Components and Impact of Sponsored Search, Computer, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp. 98-101. May 2009. [external]

Kitts, B. Laxminarayan, P. and LeBlanc, B., Meech, R. (2005) A Formal Analysis of Search Auctions Including Predictions on Click Fraud and Bidding Tactics, ACM Conference on E-Commerce, Workshop on Sponsored Search, Vancouver, UK. June 2005.

Kitts, B. (2005), Being in the Right Time at the Right Place: The Effect of Time on Pay Per Click Auctions, Search Engine Advisor Newsletter, Vol. 4, Iss. 1, January 2005.

Kitts, B., LeBlanc, B. (2004), Optimal Bidding on Keyword Auctions, Electronic Markets - The International Journal of Electronic Commerce and Business Media, Vol. 14, No. 3.

Kitts, B., LeBlanc, B. (2004), A Trading Agent and Simulator for Keyword Auctions, Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004), July 19-23 2004, New York City, NY.

Kitts, B., Hetherington, K., Vrieze, M. (2002), Large-scale mining, discovery and visualization of WWW user clickpaths, International Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 21-48.

Recommendation Systems and eCommerce

Kitts, B. (2005), Product Targeting From Rare Events: Five Years of One-to-One Marketing at CPI, Marketing Science Conference, Atlanta, June 2005.

Kitts, B., Freed, D., Vrieze, M. (2000), Cross-sell: A fast, promotion-tunable recommendation method based on conditionally independent probabilities, Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2000), August 20-23, Boston.

Data Mining Case Studies

Bardaro, M., Kitts, B., Lee, S., Giusti, S., Gammieri, G., Shepard, J., Bassett, H., Keeney, M., Senkyrik, A., Swetonic, T. (2015), "Ritani for Life's Defining Moments", 2015 David Ogilvy Award Winning Case Study, (e-commerce category Silver winner), The Advertising Research Foundation.

Kitts, B., Wadsworth Drake, J., Vollmann, W., Ross, I., Martin, G., Tjen, D., Au, D., Zlomek, S., Chun, A., Sobieski, J., Giusti, S., Lyons, M., Harris, J., Kovalik, I., Perkins, B., Smith, S., Hill, M., Boyarsky, A., Morse, E. (2014), "Art.com: Find Your Art. Love Your Space.", 2014 David Ogilvy Award Winning Case Study, (Cross-Channel Gold winner and Household category Gold winner), The Advertising Research Foundation.

Lee, A., Lee, S., Giusti, S., Kitts, B., Au, D., Shepard, J., Moore, L., Zlomek, S., Schwartz, C., Crim, J., Nelson, M., Lesinski, K., Rongisch, N., Carstens, M., Bangs, J., Pyle, B., Nygard, P., Ebeling, M. (2014), "Physicians Mutual Insurance Company: Insurance For All Of Us”, 2014 David Ogilvy Award Winning Case Study, (Professional Services category Gold winner), The Advertising Research Foundation.

Melli, G., Kitts, B. (2013) (editors), Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Data Mining Practice Prize, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2013 (ICDMW 2013), IEEE Press.

Melli, G., Wu, X., Beinat, P., Bonchi, F., Cao, L., Duan, R., Faloutsos, C., Ghani, R., Kitts, B., Goethals, B., McLachlan, G., Pei, J., Srivastava, A., Zaïane, O. (2012), Top-10 Data Mining Case Studies. International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 389-400.

Kitts, B., Brooks, R., Roberts, T., Abdo, J., Duncan, T., Perry, J., Tate, R., Taylor, C., Tellefsen, P., Krebs, C., Vacanti, S., Zlomek, S., Giusti, S., Box, T., Chun, A., Au, D., Wadsworth-Drake, J. (2012), "Rockwell Tools: Breaking Sales Records at Rockwell Tools", 2012 David Ogilvy Award Winning Case Study, (etail/retail category Silver winner), The Audience Research Foundation.

Kitts, B. Melli, G. and Ding, W, (2011) (editors), Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Data Mining Practice Prize, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2011 (ICDMW 2011), IEEE Press.

Kitts, B. Melli, G. and Peter van der Putten, (2009) (editors), Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Data Mining Practice Prize, Fifteenth ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2009), June 28, 2009, ACM Press.

Kitts, B. Melli, G. (2007) (editors), Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Data Mining Practice Prize, Thirteenth ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2007), August 12, 2007. ACM Press.

Kitts, B. Melli, G. and Zaiane, O. (2006) (editors), Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery from Databases (SIGKDD) Explorations: Special Issue on Successful Applications of Data Mining, ACM Press.

Kitts, B. Melli, G. and Rexer, K. (2005) (editors), Proceedings of the First Workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Data Mining Practice Prize, Fifth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2005), November 27, 2005, IEEE Press. [external]

Kitts, B. (2014), Towards a Conversion Tracking system for Television that uses Set Top Box data and Conversion timestamps, Technical Report.

Kitts, B. (1999) Diamonds in the rough: Finding top customers in lower-than-average segments by predicting potential, Technical Report.

Kitts, B. (1998) The Ecology of the retail store, Technical Report.

Kitts, B. (1998) Price optimization, Technical Report.

Various areas of interest including Cognitive Science

Kitts, B., Edvinsson, L., Beding, T. (2001), Intellectual Capital: From Intangible Assets to Fitness Landscapes, Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 20, pp. 35-50, Pergamon Press.

Edvinsson, L., Kitts, B. and Beding, T. (2000), The next generation of IC measurement - the digital IC-landscape, Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 263-273, Emerald.

Kitts, B. (1999), Representation Operators and Computation, Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 2, May, pp. 223-240, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kitts, B. (1998), Regression Trees, Technical Report. A very fast matlab implementation of the Regression Tree algorithm is also available to download. Please download the library as follows: Kitts, B. (2017), BToolkit: Numerical libraries for Matlab, http://www.appliedaisystems.com/code/BToolkit.zip and then type: help dtree_train.m and help dtree_eval.m.

Kitts, B., Cooke, S., Sekuler, R., Mataric, M., (1997), Improved Pattern Recognition by Combining Invariance Methods, First International Conference on Vision, Recognition and Action. Boston, MA. May.

Cooke, S., Sekuler, R., Kitts, B., Mataric, M. (1997), Delayed and real-time imitation of complex visual gestures, First International Conference on Vision, Recognition and Action, Boston, MA. May.

Kitts, B. (1997), Regulation of Complex Systems, First International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston, MA, Sep.

Kitts, B. (1997), Evolution of Cooperation Amongst Spatially Distributed Agents, Technical Report.

Kitts, B. (1997), Much Ado About Dynamics, Metascience, Issue 11, pp. 127-134.

Kitts, B. (1996), Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Vol. 6, No. 2, May. pp. 276-279, Kluwer Academic Publishers

Kitts, B. (1996), A Statistical Link between Learning and Evolution, Proceedings of the Sixth Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS'96), Cambridge, MA, July 1996. [externa]

Kitts, B. (1996), The Computational Theory of Mind, Metascience, Vol. 10

Kitts, B. (1995), Active Reinforcement Learning & Reward Optimisation using Holland credit assignment, Active Learning Symposium, The 1995 AAAI Fall Symposium Series, MIT, November 10-12, 1995

Kitts, B. (1993), A Learning Model Based on NeuroModulation and LTP, 1993 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications (NOLTA 93), Waikiki, Dec 5-10, 1993. [Coverpage 0 ] [Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] [Page 4]

Kitts, B. (1993), Connectionist model of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and on-line spatial memory, Second Australian Cognitive Science Conference. Melbourne, 3-5 February.

Kitts, B. (1993), Is Functionalism an appropriate theory for Cognitive Science?, Second Australian Cognitive Science Conference, Melbourne, 3-5 February.

Kitts, B. (1989), The Strategic Defense Initiative: A Case Study, Research Report prepared as coursework for Y1205, School of Computing and Information Technology, Griffith University, 23rd October 1989.

Patents

Kitts, B., Burdick, B., Roberts, T., (2010), "Method and System for Automatically Targeting Ads to Television Media using Demographic Similarity", U.S. Patent 8,627,359, filed 2010, issued 2014

Kitts, B., Wei, L., Burdick, B., Au, D., Powter, A. (2010), "System and Method for Attributing Multi-Channel Conversion Events and Subsequent Activity to Multi-Channel Media Sources", US Provisional Patent Application 61/378,299

Kitts, B., Burdick, B., Au, D., Roberts, T. (2010), Method and System for Automatically Determining Demographics of Media Assets for Targeting Advertisements, Application No. 13/209,353

Kitts, B., Burdick, B., Au, D., Wei, L., Powter, A. (2010), System and Method for Determining Effects of Multi-channel media sources on multi-channel Conversion Events, US Application No. 13/221,865

Kitts, B., Au, D., Lee, A. (2013), Television Advertisement Targeting Scoring Service that Balances Targeting Against Previous Airings, US Provisional Patent, filed 2013

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B. (2012), System and Method for tracking advertiser return on investment using set top box data, US Patent Application

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B., Lee, A., Powter, A., Sobieski, J. (2012), Target-weight landscape creation for real-time tracking of advertisement campaigns, US Patent Application

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B. (2012), Continuous optimization of advertising campaigns based on real-time tracking, US Patent Application

Kitts, B., Au, D., Burdick, B. (2012), Tracking and managing advertising campaigns using mirrored experimental designs, US Patent Application

Kitts, B. (2002) Method for Improving Site Design by Comparing the Value of Different Web Real-Estate Locations against Observed Page Performance, US Patent US8392551 B2, filed 2000, issued 2013

Kitts, B. (2002), Discovery, Analysis and Visualization of WWW User Clickpaths using Significance thresholding, Hierarchical and Force-directed graphing methods, US Patent US7278105 B1, filed 2000, Granted 2007

Kitts, B. (2001), Analysis of product interactions using graphical methods, US Patent US7278105 B1, filed 2001, issued 2007

Kitts, B. (2001), Method of predicting a customer's business potential and a data, US Patent US20030009368 A1, filed 2001, issued 2003

Kitts, B. (2001), Method of modeling product demand subject to a large number of interactions, US Patent 7,197,474, filed 2001, issued 2007

Kitts, B. (2008) Publisher advertisement return on investment optimization, US Patent Application 20080275770

Kitts, B. (2008), Click Fraud Protector, 11/559,291. US 2008/0114624 A1, Application 20080114624

Najm, T., Kitts, B., Burdick, B. (2008) Identifying automated click fraud programs, US Patent Application 20080281606

David Jakubowski, Yosha R Ulrich-Stumat, Brian Burdick, Gary W Flake, Brett D Brewer, Christopher Meek, David Max Chickering, Jody D Biggs, Ewa Dominowska, Richard Liam Pelly, Christopher Andrew Daniels, Brendan Kitts, Yusuf I Mehdi, Tarek Najm, (2007), Lightweight and heavyweight interfaces to federated advertising marketplace, US Patent Application

Kitts, B. and Marckini, F. (2004), Methods and Systems for Paid Media Optimization, Patent, Docket 1159P007US00, 80113.005US1. Provisional filed July 22nd, converted to patent filing July 20th, 2005.

Kitts, B. and Freed, D., (2001) Fast tunable system and method for recommending items to users based on conditionally independent probabilities, Provisional patent

Freed, D. and Kitts, B. (2001), Data storage and processing method for fast memory-efficient automated collaborative filtering on sparse data, Patent pending

Kitts, B. (2001), Method of predicting behavior of a customer at a future date and a data processing system readable medium, US Patent Application US20020165755 A1

Edvinsson, E., Beding, T. and Kitts, B. (2001), The Supremal Space Converter, Patent Application Number 0102608-7, Swedish Patent and Registration Office, Stockholm, Sweden, Includes international application.

Media

Kate Kaye (2013), Inside a Data-Driven Ad Buy: Study Claims Set Top Box Data Trumps the Human Touch, AdAge, Nov 26, 2013

Study Finds TV Advertisers Produce Higher Lift When Using Set Top Box Data Compared to Age/Gender Data Sets, PrecisionDemand Press Release, 2013

adCenter announces new conversion tracking options (2009)

adCenter announces click quality reports (2007)

Kitts, B. Vrieze, M., Freed, D. (2005), The Right Product For the Right Person: Product Recommendation from Infrequent Events, Sample Videos from the INFORMS Marketing Science Practice Prize 2005, , A free, 5 minute version of the talk can be downloaded from this link.

How Hat World boosted conversion rates 71% through better search marketing, Internet Retailer, Thursday, September 23, 2004. Hatworld is one of our most successful clients.

Overture, iProspect highlight tools to improve paid search management, Internet Retailer, September 23, 2004.

iProspect Unviels New Search Engine Bid Tool: Search Engine Marketing Firm iProspect unveiled iSEBA at the Search Engine Strategies Conference today, WebProNews, 2004-08-02

iProspect Unviels New Search Engine Bid Tool, WebProNews, 2004-08-02

iProspect Announces Patent In Response To Overture Product Launch, Media Daily News, Wednesday, July 28, 2004. Patent filed on the iSEBA bidding system.

Vignette Press Release, June 12, 2001, HarborFreight.com Chooses Vignette to Enhance Its Online. Describes Harbor Freight’s success with their recommendation system

Isakson, J. (2000), Se upp for stupet!, Guru, November 2000, pp. 28. Describes the IC mapping work performed with Leif Edvinsson and Tord Beding (Sweden). Guru is a Swedish popular magazine

Stodder, D. (2000), A Discovery With No Name, Intelligent Enterprise, October 20, 2000, Vol. 3, No. 16, Brief mention of my talk at a conference in Boston

Amato-McCoy, M. (1999), New Customer Management System Returns Lost Sales to Dick's, RT Magazine, June 1999. Describes coupon targeting, price optimization and affinity experiment performed for Brodbeck Enterprises.

Wellman, D. (1999), Down in the Data Mines, Supermarket Business, May, pp. 33-36. Describes my experiment with Brodbeck supermarkets in excellent detail

Weinstein, S. (1999), Tackling Technology, Progressive Grocer, Overview of the Brodbeck work

Whiting, R. and Sweat, J. (1999), Profitable Customers, InformationWeek. Overview of the Brodbeck work.

Code

The code below is freely available to download for all scientific uses for the betterment of mankind. If you use it for something interesting please drop me an email. If you use, please provide a citation, eg. Kitts, B. (2017), BToolkit: Numerical libraries for Matlab,
http://www.appliedaisystems.com/code/BToolkit.zip

BToolkit
35,000 lines of Matlab code that I use for data mining. Much of the code is vectorized and so extremely fast, eg. have a look at dtree_train and dtree_eval - this is decision tree code implementation of the paper on Regression Trees Please reference as Kitts, B. (2017), BToolkit: Numerical libraries for Matlab, http://www.appliedaisystems.com/code/BToolkit.zip

Opt_simulation
Short Matlab code showing simulation of ad-serving auction, and various optimization algorithms. If you use, please reference as Kitts, B. (2017), Opt_Simulation: Simple Ad-serving simulation code for Matlab, http://www.appliedaisystems.com/code/opt_simulation.zip]

Kitts, B. (2018), Efficient Adversarial Chaff Generation for Challenge-Response Authentication Over Unsecure Networks including Application to Civilian Radio Networks, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), July 1-3, 2019, Shenzhen, China, IEEE Press. [video Notes on Setting up Email over Amateur Radio Systems, unpublished.