Hybridized term-weighting method for Dark Web classification

The role of intelligence and security informatics based on statistical computations is becoming more significant in detecting terrorism activities proactively as the extremist groups are misusing many of the obtainable facilities on the Internet to incite violence and hatred. However, the performance of statistical methods is limited due to the inadequate accuracy produced by the inability of these methods to comprehend the texts created by humans. In this paper, we propose a hybridized feature selection method based on the basic term-weighting techniques for accurate terrorism activities detection in textual contexts. The proposed method combines the feature sets selected based on different individual feature selection methods into one feature space for effective web pages classification. UNION and Symmetric Difference combination functions are proposed for dimensionality reduction of the combined feature space. The method is tested on a selected dataset from the Dark Web Forum Portal and benchmarked using various famous text classifiers. Experimental results show that the hybridized method efficiently identifies the terrorist activities content and outperforms the individual methods. Furthermore, the results revealed that the classification performance achieved by hybridizing few feature sets is relatively competitive in the number of features used for classification with higher hybridization levels. Moreover, the experiments of hybridizing functions show that the dimensionality of the feature sets is significantly reduced by applying the Symmetric Difference function for feature sets combination. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.