Investigating novel machine learning based intrusion detection models for NSL-KDD data sets

This study investigates the application of the Mutual Information (MI) feature selection technique to improve the accuracy of Machine Learning (ML) models on NSL-KDD datasets, building upon prior research. Six ML models, namely Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) with different kernels (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), are implemented for classification purposes. The proposed DT model in this study shows higher accuracy than the DT model proposed in the original paper by Ingre et al. for Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Additionally, a multi-class classification model for NSL-KDD datasets is developed, considering both normalized and non-normalized features. Interestingly, it is observed that the models trained without normalized features achieve higher accuracies compared to those trained with normalized features. Moreover, the study enhances the classification performance of the DT-based IDS using the Correlation based Feature Selection (CFS) technique for feature selection. The proposed IDS is evaluated both before and after feature selection for multi-class classification (normal and various attack types) and binary classification (normal and abnormal data).