An optimized ensemble model with advanced feature selection for network intrusion detection

Abstract

In today’s digital era, advancements in technology have led to unparalleled levels of connectivity, but have also brought forth a new wave of cyber threats. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are crucial for ensuring the security and integrity of networked systems by identifying and mitigating unauthorized access and malicious activities. Traditional machine learning techniques have been extensively employed for this purpose due to their high accuracy and low false alarm rates. However, these methods often fall short in detecting sophisticated and evolving threats, particularly those involving subtle variations or mutations of known attack patterns. To address this challenge, our study presents the “Optimized Random Forest (Opt-Forest),” an innovative ensemble model that combines decision forest approaches with genetic algorithms (GAs) for enhanced intrusion detection. The genetic algorithms based decision forest construction offers notable benefits by traversing a wider exploration space and mitigating the risk of becoming stuck in local optima, resulting in the discovery of more accurate and compact decision trees. Leveraging advanced feature selection techniques, including Best-First Search, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Evolutionary Search, and Genetic Search (GS), along with contemporary dataset, this research aims to enhance the adaptability and resilience of NIDS against modern cyber threats. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach against several well-known machine learning models, including AdaBoostM1 (AbM1), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), J48-Decision Tree (J48), multilayer perceptron (MLP), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), naïve Bayes (NB), and logistic model tree (LMT). The comparative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our method across various performance metrics, highlighting its potential to significantly enhance the capabilities of network intrusion detection systems.