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Article
E-mail authorship attribution using customized associative classification
Digital Investigation
  • Michael R. Schmid, Concordia University
  • Farkhund Iqbal, Zayed University
  • Benjamin C.M. Fung, McGill University
ORCID Identifiers

0000-0001-9081-3598

Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2015
Abstract

E-mail communication is often abused for conducting social engineering attacks including spamming, phishing, identity theft and for distributing malware. This is largely attributed to the problem of anonymity inherent in the standard electronic mail protocol. In the literature, authorship attribution is studied as a text categorization problem where the writing styles of individuals are modeled based on their previously written sample documents. The developed model is employed to identify the most plausible writer of the text. Unfortunately, most existing studies focus solely on improving predictive accuracy and not on the inherent value of the evidence collected. In this study, we propose a customized associative classification technique, a popular data mining method, to address the authorship attribution problem. Our approach models the unique writing style features of a person, measures the associativity of these features and produces an intuitive classifier. The results obtained by conducting experiments on a real dataset reveal that the presented method is very effective.

Publisher
Elsevier Ltd
Disciplines
Keywords
  • Computer crime,
  • Data mining,
  • Electronic mail,
  • Malware,
  • Text processing,
  • Anonymity,
  • Associative classification,
  • Authorship,
  • Crime investigation,
  • Rule mining,
  • Write-print,
  • Classification (of information)
Scopus ID

84938987816

Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Indexed in Scopus
Yes
Open Access
Yes
Open Access Type
Hybrid: This publication is openly available in a subscription-based journal/series
Citation Information
Michael R. Schmid, Farkhund Iqbal and Benjamin C.M. Fung. "E-mail authorship attribution using customized associative classification" Digital Investigation Vol. 14 (2015) p. S116 - S126 ISSN: <p><a href="https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/issn/1742-2876" target="_blank">1742-2876</a></p>
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/farkhund-iqbal/90/