Feature selection and machine learning classification for malware detection

Malware is a computer security problem that can morph to evade traditional detection methods based on known signature matching. Since new malware variants contain patterns that are similar to those in observed malware, machine learning techniques can be used to identify new malware. This work presents a comparative study of several feature selection methods with four different machine learning classifiers in the context of static malware detection based on n-grams analysis. The result shows that the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) feature selection and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification gives the best classification accuracy using a minimum number of features.