AUTO-TUNING PROGRAM ANALYSIS TOOLS BASED ON USER FEEDBACK

User-guided machine learning (ML) significantly reduces false alarms generated by an automated analysis tool performing static security analysis. User interactivity involves initial review and annotation of findings (“witnesses”) in a report generated by the analysis tool. Those annotated findings are then used by the system to generate a “hypothesis” about how to further classify the static analysis findings in the report. The hypothesis is implemented as a machine learning classifier. To generate the classifier, a set of features are abstracted from a typical witness, and the system compares feature sets against one another to determine a set of weights for the classifier. The initial hypothesis is then validated against a second set of user-annotated findings, and the classifier is adjusted as necessary based on how close it fits the new data. Once the approach converges on a final classifier, it is used to filter remaining findings in the report.