TSE-IDS: A Two-Stage Classifier Ensemble for Intelligent Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) play a pivotal role in computer security by discovering and repealing malicious activities in computer networks. Anomaly-based IDS, in particular, rely on classification models trained using historical data to discover such malicious activities. In this paper, an improved IDS based on hybrid feature selection and two-level classifier ensembles is proposed. An hybrid feature selection technique comprising three methods, i.e. particle swarm optimization, ant colony algorithm, and genetic algorithm, is utilized to reduce the feature size of the training datasets (NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 are considered in this paper). Features are selected based on the classification performance of a reduced error pruning tree (REPT) classifier. Then, a two-level classifier ensembles based on two meta learners, i.e., rotation forest and bagging, is proposed. On the NSL-KDD dataset, the proposed classifier shows 85.8% accuracy, 86.8% sensitivity, and 88.0% detection rate, which remarkably outperform other classification techniques recently proposed in the literature. Results regarding the UNSW-NB15 dataset also improve the ones achieved by several state of the art techniques. Finally, to verify the results, a two-step statistical significance test is conducted. This is not usually considered by IDS research thus far and, therefore, adds value to the experimental results achieved by the proposed classifier

Enhancement performance of random forest algorithm via one hot encoding for IoT IDS

The random forest algorithm is one of important supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms. In the present paper, the accuracy of the results of the random forest (RF) algorithm has been improved by the use of the One Hot Encoding method. The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can be defined as a system that can predict security vulnerabilities within network traffic and is located out of range on a network infrastructure. It does not affect the efficiency of the built-in network because it analyzes a copy of the built-in traffic flow and reports results to the administrator by giving alerts. However, since IDS is a listening system only, it cannot take automatic action to prevent an attack or security vulnerability detected from infecting the system, it provides information about the source address to start the break-in, the address of the target and the type of suspected attack. The IoTID20 dataset is used to verify the improved algorithm, where this dataset is having three targets, the proposed system is compared with the state-of-art approaches and shows superiority over them