Data Mining Methods Applied to a Digital Forensics Task for Supervised Machine Learning

Abstract

Digital forensics research includes several stages. Once we have collected the data the last goal is to obtain a model in order to predict the output with unseen data. We focus on supervised machine learning techniques. This chapter performs an experimental study on a forensics data task for multi-class classification including several types of methods such as decision trees, bayes classifiers, based on rules, artificial neural networks and based on nearest neighbors. The classifiers have been evaluated with two performance measures: accuracy and Cohen’s kappa. The followed experimental design has been a 4-fold cross validation with thirty repetitions for non-deterministic algorithms in order to obtain reliable results, averaging the results from 120 runs. A statistical analysis has been conducted in order to compare each pair of algorithms by means of t-tests using both the accuracy and Cohen’s kappa metrics.