Software forensics for discriminating between program authors using case-based reasoning, feed-forward neural networks and multiple discriminant analysis

Date
1999
Authors
MacDonell, SG
Gray, AR
MacLennan, G,
Sallis, PJ,
Supervisor
Item type
Conference Contribution
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society Press
Abstract

Software forensics is the field that, by treating pieces of program source code as linguistically and stylistically analyzable entities, attempts to investigate computer program authorship. This can be performed with the goal of identification, discrimination, or characterization of authors. In this paper we extract a set of 26 standard authorship metrics from 351 programs by 7 different authors. The use of feedforward neural networks, multiple discriminant analysis, and case-based reasoning is then investigated in terms of classification accuracy for the authors on both training and testing samples. The first two techniques produce remarkably similar results, with the best results coming from the case-based reasoning models. All techniques have high prediction accuracy rates, supporting the feasibility of the task of discriminating program authors based on source-code measurements

Description
Keywords
Feedforward neural networks , Feedforward systems , Forensics , Information analysis , Information science , Neural networks , Plagiarism , Programming profession , Psychology , Volume measurement
Source
Proceedings from the ICONIP '99 6th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP'99/ANZIIS'99/ANNES'99/ACNN'99), Perth, Australia, pp.66-71
Rights statement
Copyright © 1999 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.