Proving data-poisoning robustness in decision trees

Machine learning models are brittle, and small changes in the training data can result in different predictions. We study the problem of proving that a prediction is robust to data poisoning, where an attacker can inject a number of malicious elements into the training set to influence the learned model. We target decision-tree models, a popular and simple class of machine learning models that underlies many complex learning techniques. We present a sound verification technique based on abstract interpretation and implement it in a tool called Antidote. Antidote abstractly trains decision trees for an intractably large space of possible poisoned datasets. Due to the soundness of our abstraction, Antidote can produce proofs that, for a given input, the corresponding prediction would not have changed had the training set been tampered with or not. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Antidote on a number of popular datasets.

• Software and its engineering → Automated static analysis; • Security and privacy → Formal methods and theory of security; • Computing methodologies → Classification and regression trees.