From fireeye.com
An increasing number of modern antivirus solutions rely on machine learning (ML) techniques to protect users from malware. While ML-based approaches, like FireEye Endpoint Security’s MalwareGuard capability, have done a great job at detecting new threats, they also come with substantial development costs. Creating and curating a large set of useful features takes significant amounts of time and expertise from malware analysts and data scientists (note that in this context a feature refers to a property or characteristic of the executable that can be used to distinguish between goodware and malware).