An Evolutionary Computation Based Feature Selection Method for Intrusion Detection

Data Availability: The data used to support the fndings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61403206, 61771258, and 61876089), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20141005 and BK20160910), the Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China (14KJB520025), the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, the Open Research Fund of Jiangsu Engineering Research Center of Communication and Network Technology, NJUPT (JSGCZX17001), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK20140883.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Improved hybrid teaching learning based optimization-jaya and support vector machine for intrusion detection systems

Most of the currently existing intrusion detection systems (IDS) use machine learning algorithms to detect network intrusion. Machine learning algorithms have widely been adopted recently to enhance the performance of IDSs. While the effectiveness of some machine learning algorithms in detecting certain types of network intrusion has been ascertained, the situation remains that no single method currently exists that can achieve consistent results when employed for the detection of multiple attack types. Hence, the detection of network attacks on computer systems has remain a relevant field of research for some time. The support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most powerful machine learning algorithms with excellent learning performance characteristics. However, SVM suffers from many problems, such as high rates of false positive alerts, as well as low detection rates of rare but dangerous attacks that affects its performance; feature selection and parameters optimization are important operations needed to increase the performance of SVM. The aim of this work is to develop an improved optimization method for IDS that can be efficient and effective in subset feature selection and parameters optimization. To achieve this goal, an improved Teaching Learning-Based Optimization (ITLBO) algorithm was proposed in dealing with subset feature selection. Meanwhile, an improved parallel Jaya (IPJAYA) algorithm was proposed for searching the best parameters (C, Gama) values of SVM. Hence, a hybrid classifier called ITLBO-IPJAYA-SVM was developed in this work for the improvement of the efficiency of network intrusion on data sets that contain multiple types of attacks. The performance of the proposed approach was evaluated on NSL-KDD and CICIDS intrusion detection datasets and from the results, the proposed approaches exhibited excellent performance in the processing of large datasets. The results also showed that SVM optimization algorithm achieved accuracy values of 0.9823 for NSL-KDD dataset and 0.9817 for CICIDS dataset, which were higher than the accuracy of most of the existing paradigms for classifying network intrusion detection datasets. In conclusion, this work has presented an improved optimization algorithm that can improve the accuracy of IDSs in the detection of various types of network attack

Performance Evaluation of Intrusion Detection System using Selected Features and Machine Learning Classifiers

Some of the main challenges in developing an effective network-based intrusion detection system (IDS) include analyzing large network traffic volumes and realizing the decision boundaries between normal and abnormal behaviors. Deploying feature selection together with efficient classifiers in the detection system can overcome these problems.  Feature selection finds the most relevant features, thus reduces the dimensionality and complexity to analyze the network traffic.  Moreover, using the most relevant features to build the predictive model, reduces the complexity of the developed model, thus reducing the building classifier model time and consequently improves the detection performance.  In this study, two different sets of selected features have been adopted to train four machine-learning based classifiers.  The two sets of selected features are based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach respectively.  These evolutionary-based algorithms are known to be effective in solving optimization problems.  The classifiers used in this study are Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine that have been trained and tested using the NSL-KDD dataset. The performance of the abovementioned classifiers using different features values was evaluated.  The experimental results indicate that the detection accuracy improves by approximately 1.55% when implemented using the PSO-based selected features than that of using GA-based selected features.  The Decision Tree classifier that was trained with PSO-based selected features outperformed other classifiers with accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score result of 99.38%, 99.36%, 99.32%, and 99.34% respectively.  The results show that using optimal features coupling with a good classifier in a detection system able to reduce the classifier model building time, reduce the computational burden to analyze data, and consequently attain high detection rate

Lightweight Anomaly Detection Scheme Using Incremental Principal Component Analysis and Support Vector Machine

Wireless Sensors Networks have been the focus of significant attention from research and development due to their applications of collecting data from various fields such as smart cities, power grids, transportation systems, medical sectors, military, and rural areas. Accurate and reliable measurements for insightful data analysis and decision-making are the ultimate goals of sensor networks for critical domains. However, the raw data collected by WSNs usually are not reliable and inaccurate due to the imperfect nature of WSNs. Identifying misbehaviours or anomalies in the network is important for providing reliable and secure functioning of the network. However, due to resource constraints, a lightweight detection scheme is a major design challenge in sensor networks. This paper aims at designing and developing a lightweight anomaly detection scheme to improve efficiency in terms of reducing the computational complexity and communication and improving memory utilization overhead while maintaining high accuracy. To achieve this aim, oneclass learning and dimension reduction concepts were used in the design. The One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) with hyper-ellipsoid variance was used for anomaly detection due to its advantage in classifying unlabelled and multivariate data. Various One-Class Support Vector Machine formulations have been investigated and Centred-Ellipsoid has been adopted in this study due to its effectiveness. Centred-Ellipsoid is the most effective kernel among studies formulations. To decrease the computational complexity and improve memory utilization, the dimensions of the data were reduced using the Candid Covariance-Free Incremental Principal Component Analysis (CCIPCA) algorithm. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed lightweight anomaly detection scheme. Results in terms of detection accuracy, memory utilization, computational complexity, and communication overhead show that the proposed scheme is effective and efficient compared few existing schemes evaluated. The proposed anomaly detection scheme achieved the accuracy higher than 98%, with O(nd) memory utilization and no communication overhead

Applied Metaheuristic Computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

Applied Methuerstic computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC