FINDING · EVALUATION
XGBoost trained on a single month of OONI data achieves near-optimal performance; expanding the training window to 24 months produces deviations of only 0–5 percentage points for FNR, 0.07 PP for FPR, and 0.10 PP for accuracy — suggesting that larger windows introduce noise and overfitting rather than improving detection. Isolation Forest performance degrades more sharply, with accuracy dropping ~5 PP as training data grows beyond 6 months.
From 2024-calle-toward — Toward Automated DNS Tampering Detection Using Machine Learning · §4.2, Figure 3 · 2024 · Free and Open Communications on the Internet
Implications
- ML-based DNS censorship detectors can be retrained monthly on a rolling one-month window, keeping models current with evolving censor tactics without accumulating stale signal
- Avoid long training windows for anomaly-detection models in censorship contexts; a short, recent window outperforms a longer historical one due to censor behavioral drift
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.