LAMDA: A Longitudinal Android Malware Benchmark for Concept Drift Analysis

This repository contains the dataset and code for our research on concept drift in Android malware detection. LAMDA is designed to help researchers analyze the evolving nature of Android malware by capturing temporal variations and distribution shifts over time.

📌 Accepted at ICLR 2026

Our dataset is publicly available on Hugging Face:

LAMDA Dataset

Citation

@inproceedings{haque2026lamda,
  title     = {LAMDA: A Longitudinal Android Malware Benchmark for Concept Drift Analysis},
  author    = {Haque, Md Ahsanul and Hossain, Ismail and Kamol, Md Mahmuduzzaman and Alam, Md Jahangir and
               Amalapuram, Suresh Kumar and Talukder, Sajedul and Rahman, Mohammad Saidur},
  booktitle = {The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=1FnCrZtBNQ}
}

Steps to replicate the dataset creation process

Ensure that the input CSV file is available:
- Download the latest dataset from AndroZoo: latest_with-added-date.csv.gz.
Run the AndroZoo-extractor.py:
- This will process the CSV file and categorize the data into three groups based on vt_detection:
  - Benign: vt_detection == 0
  - Malware: vt_detection >= 4
  - Unsure: 1 <= vt_detection <= 3
- SHA-256 hashes for each category and year will be written into separate text files.
```
├── malware/
│   ├── 2013/hashes.txt
│   ├── 2014/hashes.txt
│   └── ...
├── benign/
│   ├── 2013/hashes.txt
│   ├── 2014/hashes.txt
│   └── ...
```
- An HTML report summarizing the count of hashes per category and year will be generated.
Run APKDownloader.sh to download samples as per need:
- Usage: bash APKDownloader.sh /benign/2018/hashes.txt 2018 ben YOUR_API_KEY
- Another Usage: bash APKDownloader.sh /malware/2018/hashes.txt 2018 mal YOUR_API_KEY
After downloading and organizing the APKs into year-wise folders, run the feature extractor to process the APKs.
- Usage:
```
python ./dataset_preparation/drebin-feature-extractor/extractor.py \
   --input_dir ./androzoo_malware/2013/ \
   --result_dir ./output/malware/2013/
```
- After completing this process, you will have all the .data files containing Drebin-style features ready.
Now, we are ready with features. Let's extract the family labels with the help of Virustotal and AVClass.
- First collect academic API access for the virustotal
- Use the virustotal-downloader.py to download all reports from virustotal
- Usage: python virustotal-downloader.py all_year_malware_hashes.txt
- To make these JSON files usable for AVClass, we need to convert them into compact JSONL format.
- Use the jsoncompact.py to compact all the json file
- Usage: python jsoncompact.py <directory_with_json_files>
- Install AVClass from here
- Now run avclass to get the family labels
- Usage avclass -d ./all_year_vt_json/ -hash sha256 -o labels.txt
- Now we are ready with features and family labels.

Section 3: LAMDA Creation

After downloading and decompiling all the APKs, the creation of LAMDA is the following:

First, you need to split all the .data files into train and test using the following code. Make sure you have all the .data files into yearly folders as followings and you have provided the correct metadata.csv file which you can find from LAMDA huggingface repository here

├── malware/
│   ├── 2013/hashes.data ...
│   ├── 2014/hashes.data ...
│   └── ...
├── benign/
│   ├── 2013/hashes.data ...
│   ├── 2014/hashes.data ...
│   └── ...

python LAMDA_get_train_test.py

After the execution is done, you will get the train and test splits saved into npz.

For vectorization and final dataset creation, you need to use the following code. Make sure that you have provided the correct directory ( where the train test split npz files you get from the previous run) to the following code.

python vectorization_npz_creation.py

After vectorization, you will be able to get final LAMDA dataset which is saved into npz files. All the features are saved in YYYY_X_train.npz and metadata containing binary label, family label, number of virus total flagged, year month and hash are saved in YYYY_meta_train.npz (YYYY = four digit of the year when the APK was added to AndroZoo repository)

Next, you might need to split yearly npz files into monthly npz file, if you want it. For LAMDA experiments and concept drift detection, you will need to split them into yearly form.

Section 4: Concept Drift Analysis

For LAMDA experiments, go through the following instructions to recreate the results

First, download LAMDA from LAMDA huggingface repository The following code will help you download LAMDA from huggingface repository, convert the parquet file to npz, split yearly npz into monthly npz for concept drift analysis on LAMDA
```
python download_dataset_and_convert_to_npz.py
```
Second, concept drift analysis with supervised learning Use the following code to run the experiments with supervised learning on LAMDA under AnoShift-style splits, make sure you have provided the correct path of downloaded LAMDA
```
python anoshift_experiment_models_separate.py
```
To run all models in one command use the following code script,
```
./4_1_anoshift_script_LAMDA.sh
```
Plots and visualization F1-scores across the years for four models
```
python plot_near_far.py
```
For the histogram, t-sne and Jeffreys divergence heatmap plot which is provided in the paper, use the followings:
```
python malware_family_historgram.py
python 4_1_visual_analysis_jeffreys_divergence.py
python 4_1_visual_analysis_t_sne.py
```
To compare with API Graph dataset, you need to download API Graph dataset You can download the API Graph dataset from here Use the code following code for the same set of experiments as previously mentioned
```
python anoshift_experiment_api_graph.py
```
Feature Space Stability Anslysis with LAMDA and API Graph Dataset We select the top 100 malware families from the LAMDA dataset and compute their stability scores over time. These scores are then compared with the corresponding families found in the APIGraph dataset. The code below generates a combined box plot illustrating the stability scores for both LAMDA and APIGraph. It also includes feature analysis based on Optimal Transport Dataset Distance (OTDD) for both datasets. Further details can be found in Sections 4.3 of the paper.
```
4_3_lambda_stability_otdd_analysis.ipynb
4_3_apigraph_stability_otdd_analysis.ipynb
```
Furthermore we get 10 common families across all years (2013-2024) and we calculate the feature stability for each individual family from the year 2013 to year 2024. We add the cade evaluation result on test data (2014-2024) in terms of Drift and Non-drift samples. Details are available in the paper Section 4.4.
```
4_4_stability_analysis_common_families.ipynb
4_4_cade_evaluation_common_families.ipynb
```
SHAP-Based Explanation Drift USing Jaccard and Kendall Distances
```
4_5_shap_explanation_monthly_lamda.py
```
run this file to generate top 100 and top 1000 SHAP indices from lamda dataset and store in file top_shap_indices_100_lamda.txt and top_shap_indices_1000_lamda.txt
```
4_5_shap_explanation_monthly_apigraph.py
```
run this file to generate top 100 and top 1000 SHAP indices from apigraph dataset and store in file top_shap_indices_100_apigraph.txt and top_shap_indices_1000_apigraph.txt
```
4_5_shap_explanation_graphs.py 
```
run this file to generate graphs shap_explanation_drift_monthly_top_100_features_apigraph.png, shap_explanation_drift_monthly_top_1000_features_apigraph.png, shap_explanation_drift_monthly_top_100_features_lamda.png and shap_explanation_drift_monthly_top_1000_features_lamda.png

Check the Supplementary Sections here

LAMDA

Install / Use

README

LAMDA: A Longitudinal Android Malware Benchmark for Concept Drift Analysis

Citation

Steps to replicate the dataset creation process

Section 3: LAMDA Creation

Section 4: Concept Drift Analysis