ABSTRACT

Visual Analytics (VA) is a data analysis approach that focuses on effectively intertwining human and computerized analysis processes through interactive visual interfaces. These interfaces provide visual representations of data at different levels of detail and allow direct interaction techniques to navigate the data and adjust parameters for computer-based analysis techniques. This chapter starts by providing some background in behavior-based malware analysis. Subsequently, it introduces VA and its main components based on the knowledge generation model for VA. Visual Analytics (VA) is a young research field that emerged from the combination of interactive data visualization with concepts from data mining, machine learning, statistics, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. A major tenet of VA is that analytical reasoning is not a routine activity that can be automated completely. Instead it depends heavily on analysts initiative and domain experience which they can exercise through interactive visual interfaces.