Feature importance in mobile malware detection

The topic of mobile malware detection has received a lot of attention over the last years. However, while significant research has been conducted towards mobile malware detection techniques, little work has been focused on feature selection and feature importance. In this work we provide a short survey of all major datasets used by state-of-the-art malware detection works, dated from 2012 to 2020. Furthermore, we analyze applications from the most common datasets, namely Drebin, VirusShare and AndroZoo, to get permissions and intents. Lastly, we rank features using the Information Gain algorithm to compare the importance of permissions and intents, for all three datasets.