Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

8-2013

Abstract

Malicious Uniform Resource Locator (URL) detection is an important problem in web search and mining, which plays a critical role in internet security. In literature, many existing studies have attempted to formulate the problem as a regular supervised binary classification task, which typically aims to optimize the prediction accuracy. However, in a real-world malicious URL detection task, the ratio between the number of malicious URLs and legitimate URLs is highly imbalanced, making it very inappropriate for simply optimizing the prediction accuracy. Besides, another key limitation of the existing work is to assume a large amount of training data is available, which is impractical as the human labeling cost could be potentially quite expensive. To solve these issues, in this paper, we present a novel framework of Cost-Sensitive Online Active Learning (CSOAL), which only queries a small fraction of training data for labeling and directly optimizes two cost-sensitive measures to address the class-imbalance issue. In particular, we propose two CSOAL algorithms and analyze their theoretical performance in terms of cost-sensitive bounds. We conduct an extensive set of experiments to examine the empirical performance of the proposed algorithms for a large-scale challenging malicious URL detection task, in which the encouraging results showed that the proposed technique by querying an extremely small-sized labeled data (about 0.5% out of 1-million instances) can achieve better or highly comparable classification performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art cost-insensitive and cost-sensitive online classification algorithms using a huge amount of labeled data.

Keywords

Active learning, Cost-sensitive learning, Malicious URL detection, Online learning

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Databases and Information Systems | Information Security

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

KDD '13: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 11-14, Chicago

First Page

919

Last Page

927

ISBN

9781450321747

Identifier

10.1145/2487575.2487647

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2487575.2487647

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