Open Access

Predictive Behavioral Cybersecurity for Smart Healthcare and Mobile Ecosystems: An Ensemble Machine Learning Framework for Dynamic Malware Intelligence

4 Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Toronto, Canada

Abstract

The proliferation of smart healthcare devices, mobile platforms, and interconnected computing infrastructures has transformed the digital ecosystem into an environment of unprecedented complexity and vulnerability. As healthcare systems increasingly integrate wearable sensors, Internet of Medical Things devices, and mobile applications into patient monitoring and clinical workflows, the attack surface for sophisticated malware has expanded dramatically. Contemporary threats no longer rely solely on static payloads; instead, they employ obfuscation, polymorphism, virtualization awareness, dynamic packing, and adversarial evasion to circumvent traditional detection systems. While prior research has explored static feature analysis, behavioral profiling, sandbox execution, ensemble learning, and deep neural architectures for malware detection, the challenge of dynamically predicting malicious behaviors before irreversible system compromise remains insufficiently addressed. This study proposes a unified theoretical and methodological framework for dynamic behavioral intelligence tailored to smart healthcare devices and mobile ecosystems.

Drawing upon recent advances in machine learning-based malware classification and dynamic threat modeling, the research synthesizes insights from behavioral sandboxing, ensemble tree-based models, semi-supervised deep learning, and feature selection strategies. Particular attention is devoted to the emerging paradigm of predictive security in smart healthcare contexts, as exemplified by the dynamic prediction mechanisms proposed for healthcare devices in recent scholarship (Kurada et al., 2025). The article critically evaluates traditional static detection approaches, dynamic taint analysis, virtual machine introspection, and ensemble classification models, arguing that future security architectures must transition from reactive detection to anticipatory behavioral forecasting.

Methodologically, the study constructs a comprehensive behavioral dataset derived from sandbox execution traces, system call sequences, network communication patterns, permission requests, and device-level telemetry consistent with smart healthcare environments. Advanced feature engineering is integrated with ensemble learning, gradient boosting, and semi-supervised deep models to enable early-stage malicious intent prediction. The framework is evaluated conceptually through performance interpretation grounded in established empirical findings from malware detection literature. Results indicate that dynamic behavioral intelligence models significantly enhance predictive reliability, reduce false positives in imbalanced datasets, and demonstrate superior resilience against obfuscation techniques compared to purely static classifiers.

The discussion situates these findings within broader debates concerning explainability, ethical deployment in healthcare, adversarial machine learning, and the sustainability of security infrastructures in mobile cloud ecosystems. The study concludes that predictive behavioral modeling represents a necessary evolution in cybersecurity for critical domains such as healthcare, where latency in detection may translate into clinical risk. By unifying theoretical foundations and machine learning methodologies, this research contributes to the development of proactive, context-aware malware defense strategies capable of safeguarding next-generation smart medical infrastructures.

Keywords

References

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