An Ensemble Approach Based on Fuzzy Logic Using Machine Learning Classifiers for Android Malware Detection

Abstract

In this study, a fuzzy logic-based dynamic ensemble (FL-BDE) model was proposed to detect malware exposed to the Android operating system. The FL-BDE model contains a structure that combines both the processing power of machine learning (ML)-based methods and the decision-making power of the Mamdani-type fuzzy inference system (FIS). In this structure, six different methods, namely, logistic regression (LR), Bayes point machine (BPM), boosted decision tree (BDT), neural network (NN), decision forest (DF) and support vector machine (SVM) were used as ML-based methods to benefit from their scores. However, through an approach involving the process of voting and routing, the scores of only three ML-based methods which were more successful in classifying either the negative instances or positive instances were sent to the FIS to be combined. During the combining process, the FIS processed the incoming inputs and determined the malicious application score. Experimental studies were performed by applying the FL-BDE model and ML-based methods to the balanced dataset obtained from the APK files downloaded in the Drebin database and Google Play Store. The obtained results showed us that the FL-BDE model had a much better performance than the ML-based models did, with an accuracy of 0.9933, a recall of 1.00, a specificity of 0.9867, a precision of 0.9868, and an F-measure of 0.9934. These results also proved that the proposed model can be used as a more competitive and powerful malware detection model compared to those of similar studies in the literature.