Towards Machine Learning Enabled Automatic Design of IT-Network Architectures

Abstract: There are many machine learning techniques that cannot be performed on graph-data. Techniques such as graph embedding, i.e mapping a graph to a vector, can open up a variety of machine learning solutions. This thesis addresses to what extent static graph embedding techniques can capture important characteristics of an IT-architecture graph, with the purpose of embedding the graphs in a common euclidean vector space that can serve as the state space in a reinforcement learning setup. The metric used for evaluating the performance of the embedding is the security of the graph, i.e the time it would take for an unauthorized attacker to penetrate the IT-architecture graph. The algorithms evaluated in this work are the node embedding methods node2vec and gat2vec and the graph embedding method graph2vec. The predictive results of the embeddings are compared with two baseline methods. The results of each of the algorithms mostly display a significant predictive performance improvement compared to the baseline, where the F1 score in some cases is doubled. Indeed, the results indicate that static graph embedding methods can in fact capture some information about the security of an IT-architecture. However, no conclusion can be made whether a static graph embedding is actually the best contender for posing as the state space in a reinforcement learning framework. To make a certain conclusion other options has to be researched, such as dynamic graph embedding methods.