Anti-virus systems traditionally use signatures to detect malicious executables, but signatures are over-fitted features that are of little use in machine learning. Other more heuristic methods seek to utilize more general features, with some degree of success. In this paper, we present a data mining approach that conducts an exhaustive feature search on a set of computer viruses and strives to obviate over-fitting. We also evaluate the predictive power of a classifier by taking into account dependence relationships that exist between viruses, and we show that our classifier yields high detection rates and can be expected to perform as well in real-world conditions.
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