Phishing and Communication Channels: A Guide to Identifying and Mitigating Phishing Attacks

Appendix A: Machine Learning Algorithms

A variety of machine learning approaches are employed to identify phishing websites versus legitimate websites in order to protect users. This appendix will cover classification algorithms as well as clustering algorithms.

A.1 Classification Algorithms

This section provides an overview of some well-known classifiers.

A.1.1 Decision Tree

A decision tree accepts categorical as well as continuous input from the user. Based on the most important splitter (the point at which the data is partitioned) in the input features, the decision tree divides data into two or more homogeneous sets. Decision trees have nodes that indicate a feature, links that represent a rule, and leaves that represent the result (categorical ...