A Boosting-Based Hybrid Feature Selection and Multi-Layer Stacked Ensemble Learning Model to Detect Phishing Websites

Abstract

Phishing is a type of online scam where the attacker tries to trick you into giving away your personal information, such as passwords or credit card details, by posing as a trustworthy entity like a bank, email provider, or social media site. These attacks have been around for a long time and unfortunately, they continue to be a common threat. In this paper, we propose a boosting based multi layer stacked ensemble learning model that uses hybrid feature selection technique to select the relevant features for the classification. The dataset with selected features are sent to various classifiers at different layers where the predictions of lower layers are fed as input to the upper layers for the phishing detection. From the experimental analysis, it is observed that the proposed model achieved an accuracy ranging from 96.16 to 98.95% without feature selection across different datasets and also achieved an accuracy ranging from 96.18 to 98.80% with feature selection. The proposed model is compared with baseline models and it has outperformed the existing models with a significant difference.