Clustering analysis for deduplication of training set samples for machine learning based computer threat analysis

Abstract

A method, a system, and a computer program product for performing analysis of data to detect presence of malicious code are disclosed. Reduced dimensionality vectors are generated from a plurality of original dimensionality vectors representing features in a plurality of samples. The reduced dimensionality vectors have a lower dimensionality than an original dimensionality of the plurality of original dimensionality vectors. A first plurality of clusters is determined by applying a first clustering algorithm to the reduced dimensionality vectors. A second plurality of clusters is determined by applying a second clustering algorithm to one or more clusters in the first plurality of clusters using the original dimensionality. An exemplar for a cluster in the second plurality of clusters is added to a training set, which is used to train a machine learning model for identifying a file containing malicious code.