Ranking algorithms for digital forensic string search hits》.pdf

Digital Investigation 11 (2014) S124eS132 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Digital Investigation journal homepage: www.el /l ocate/diin Ranking algorithms for digital forensic string search hits * Nicole Lang Beebe , Lishu Liu The University of Texas at San Antonio, Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, San Antonio, TX, USA a b s t r a c t Keywords: This research proposes eighteen quantifiable characteristics of allocated files, unallocated Digital forensics clusters, and string search hits contained therein, which can be used to relevancy rank String search string search output. We executed a 36-term query across four disks in a synthetic case Ranking (“M57 Patents” from DigitalC), which produced over two million search hits Ranked list across nearly 50,000 allocated files and unallocated clusters. We sampled 21,400 search Relevancy hits from the case, extracted the proposed feature values, trained binary class (relevant/ not-relevant) support vector machine (SVM) models, derived two relevancy ranking functions from the resultant model feature weights, and empirically tested the ranking algorithms. We achieved 81.02% and 85.97% prediction accuracies for the allocated and