PhishStack: Evaluation of Stacked Generalization in Phishing URLs Detection

Abstract

Stacked Generalization has been assessed and evaluated in the field of Phishing URLs detection. This field has become egregious area of information security. Recently, different phishing URLs detection systems have already proposed by several researchers. But due to the lack of proper machine learning algorithm selection, the performance of those systems can be affected. A details investigation on individual machine learning classifiers on level 1 and final prediction from level 2 along with three real datasets have been presented on this paper. The performance has been evaluated by precision-recall curve, AUC-ROC curve, accuracy, misclassification rate and mean absolute error (MAE). The best AUC area obtained from Random Forest and Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) individually. But stacked generalization provides higher accuracy of 97.44% with numeric feature set in binary classification and in multiclass feature set (dataset three), provides the performance with 97.86% of accuracy. Stacked generalization provides minimum error rate and MAE of 2.142857% with multiclass feature set which leads to a strong basement of developing an anti-phishing tools.