Entropy-extreme model for predicting the development of cyber epidemics at early stages

The approaches used in biomedicine to analyze epidemics take into account features such as exponential growth in the early stages, slowdown in dynamics upon saturation, time delays in spread, segmented spread, evolutionary adaptations of the pathogen, and preventive measures based on universal communication protocols. All these characteristics are also present in modern cyber epidemics. Therefore, adapting effective biomedical approaches to epidemic analysis for the investigation of the development of cyber epidemics is a promising scientific research task. The article is dedicated to researching the problem of predicting the development of cyber epidemics at early stages. In such conditions, the available data is scarce, incomplete, and distorted. This situation makes it impossible to use artificial intelligence models for prediction. Therefore, the authors propose an entropy-extreme model, defined within the machine learning paradigm, to address this problem. The model is based on estimating the probability distributions of its controllable parameters from input data, taking into account the variability characteristic of the last ones. The entropy-extreme instance, identified from a set of such distributions, indicates the most uncertain (most negative) trajectory of the investigated process. Numerical methods are used to analyze the generated set of investigated process development trajectories based on the assessments of probability distributions of the controllable parameters and the variability characteristic. The result of the analysis includes characteristic predictive trajectories such as the average and median trajectories from the set, as well as the trajectory corresponding to the standard deviation area of the parameters’ values. Experiments with real data on the infection of Windows-operated devices by various categories of malware showed that the proposed model outperforms the classical competitor (least squares method) in predicting the development of cyber epidemics near the extremum of the time series representing the deployment of such a process over time. Moreover, the proposed model can be applied without any prior hypotheses regarding the probabilistic properties of the available data.