Enhancing The Performance of Network Traffic Classification Methods Using Efficient Feature Selection Models

In the era of secure communication and the constantly changing pattern of internet applications, traditional packet classification methods fail to achieve the accuracy needed for diverse network management functions. Recently Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been used to design viable packet classification solutions. However, due to the complexity and dynamic feature of internet traffic, efficient packet classification is still challenging for various machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose the adoption of feature selection methods through dimensionality reduction to enhance the classifiers' performance. We evaluated the performance of four well-known classifiers, including K-nearest neighbour (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees (DT), and Logistic Regression (LR) with and without feature selection. We used two feature selection methods, including principal component analysis and Autoencoder. Experimental analysis is performed on real network traffic datasets with binary and multi-class categories. We assessed each classifier's performance using precision, recall, f-score, accuracy, and ROC. Experimental results show that the Precision, Recall, and F-score for the Multi-class problem are improved by 4.7 %, 6%, and 9%, respectively, after adopting either PCA or Autoencoder methods. The classification accuracy is also improved by up to 13%. We can also conclude that Autoencoder performed better for the KNN and LR, while PCA achieved comparable results for both the SVM and DT classifiers.