Imbalanced malware classification: an approach based on dynamic classifier selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, the rise of cyber threats has emphasized the need for robust malware detection systems, especially on mobile devices. Malware, which targets vulnerabilities in devices and user data, represents a substantial security risk. A significant challenge in malware detection is the imbalance in datasets, where most applications are benign, with only a small fraction posing a threat. This study addresses the often-overlooked issue of class imbalance in malware detection by evaluating various machine learning strategies for detecting malware in Android applications. We assess monolithic classifiers and ensemble methods, focusing on dynamic selection algorithms, which have shown superior performance compared to traditional approaches. In contrast to balancing strategies performed on the whole dataset, we propose a balancing procedure that works individually for each classifier in the pool. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that the KNOP algorithm obtained the best results using a pool of Random Forest. Additionally, an instance hardness assessment revealed that balancing reduces the difficulty of the minority class and enhances the detection of the minority class (malware). The code used for the experiments is available at https://github.com/jvss2/Machine-Learning-Empirical-Evaluation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".