A new machine learning-based method for android malware detection on imbalanced dataset

Nowadays, malware applications are dangerous threats to Android devices, users, developers, and application stores. Researchers are trying to discover new methods for malware detection because the complexity of malwares, their continuous changes, and damages caused by their attacks have increased. One of the most important challenges in detecting malware is to have a balanced dataset. In this paper, a detection method is proposed to identify malware to improve accuracy and reduce error rates by preprocessing the used dataset and balancing it. To attain these purposes, the static analysis is used to extract features of the applications. The ranking methods of features are used to preprocess the feature set and the low-effective features are removed. The proposed method also balances the dataset by using the techniques of undersampling, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), and a combination of both methods, which have not yet been studied among detection methods. Then, the classifiers of K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine, and Iterative Dichotomiser 3 are used to create the detection model. The performance of KNN with SMOTE is better than the performance of the other classifiers. The obtained results indicate that the criteria of precision, recall, accuracy, F-measure, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient are over 97%. The proposed method is effective in detecting 99.49% of the malware’s existing in the used dataset and new malware.