Identifying meaningful clusters in malware data

•We introduce a novel data preprocessing method.•Unlike other methods, ours iteratively favours more meaningful features.•We demonstrate its efficacy on a noisy data set with overlapped clusters. Finding meaningful clusters in drive-by-download malware data is a particularly difficult task. Malware data tends to contain overlapping clusters with wide variations of cardinality. This happens because there can be considerable similarity between malware samples (some are even said to belong to the same family), and these tend to appear in bursts. Clustering algorithms are usually applied to normalised data sets. However, the process of normalisation aims at setting features with different range values to have a similar contribution to the clustering. It does not favour more meaningful features over those that are less meaningful, an effect one should perhaps expect of the data pre-processing stage. In this paper we introduce a method to deal precisely with the problem above. This is an iterative data pre-processing method capable of aiding to increase the separation between clusters. It does so by calculating the within-cluster degree of relevance of each feature, and then it uses these as a data rescaling factor. By repeating this until convergence our malware data was separated in clear clusters, leading to a higher average Silhouette width.