CCE Theses and Dissertations
Campus Access Only
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Date of Award
2013
Document Type
Dissertation - NSU Access Only
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Information Systems (DCIS)
Department
Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences
Advisor
Wei Li
Committee Member
Sumitra Mukherjee
Committee Member
Easwar Nyshadham
Keywords
email based attacks, information security, logistic regression, machine learning, phishing, privacy and security
Abstract
The majority of documented phishing attacks have been carried by email, yet few studies have measured the impact of email headers on the predictive accuracy of machine learning techniques in detecting email phishing attacks. Research has shown that the inclusion of a limited subset of email headers as features in training machine learning algorithms to detect phishing attack did increase the predictive accuracy of these learning algorithms. The same research also recommended further investigation of the impact of including an expanded set of email headers on the predictive accuracy of machine learning algorithms.
In addition, research has shown that the cost of misclassifying legitimate emails as phishing attacks--false positives--was far higher than that of misclassifying phishing emails as legitimate--false negatives, while the opposite was true in the case of fraud detection. Consequently, they recommended that cost sensitive measures be taken in order to further improve the weighted predictive accuracy of machine learning algorithms.
Motivated by the potentially high impact of the inclusion of email headers on the predictive accuracy of machines learning algorithms and the significance of enabling cost-sensitive measures as part of the learning process, the goal of this research was to quantify the impact of including an extended set of email headers and to investigate the impact of imposing penalty as part of the learning process on the number of false positives. It was believed that if email headers were included and cost-sensitive measures were taken as part of the learning process, than the overall weighted, predictive accuracy of the machine learning algorithm would be improved. The results showed that adding email headers as features did improve the overall predictive accuracy of machine learning algorithms and that cost-sensitive measure taken as part of the learning process did result in lower false positives.
NSUWorks Citation
Hicham Refaat Tout. 2013. Measuring the Impact of email Headers on the Predictive Accuracy of Machine Learning Techniques. Doctoral dissertation. Nova Southeastern University. Retrieved from NSUWorks, Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences. (325)
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/gscis_etd/325.