Features Reduction with PCA Technique for Malware Detection Using Machine Learning

Malware had been a problem for quite some times since it spreads easily and can cause various problems. Currently, malware is also one of the big threats for internet users. With a huge number of internet users today, techniques that can automatically detect malware before it infects the system is required. This study aims to develop malware detection using machine learning approach with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as feature reduction. PCA (Principal Component Analysis) is expected to be able to reduce the number of features which then could also reduce the learning time but do not reduce its accuracy significantly. There were four machine learning classifiers used in this study, i.e. K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree, Naïve bayes, and Random Forest. The n-components used in this study were 20 and 34 and the ratio of test and train in the dataset was 35% for test and 65% for training. The results have shown that the best performance come from the detection using random forest with 34 n-component and 100 n-estimator with the average accuracy was 0.991688.