Hybrid wrapper feature selection method based on genetic algorithm and extreme learning machine for intrusion detection

Abstract Intrusion detection systems play a critical role in the mitigation of cyber-attacks on the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Due to the integration of many devices within the IoT environment, a huge amount of data is generated. The generated data sets in most cases consist of irrelevant and redundant features that affect the performance of the existing intrusion detection systems (IDS). The selection of optimal features plays a critical role in the enhancement of intrusion detection systems. This study proposes a sequential feature selection approach using an optimized extreme learning machine (ELM) with an SVM (support vector machine) classifier. The main challenge of ELM is the selection of the input parameters, which affect its performance. In this study, the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the weights of ELM to boost its performance. After the optimization, the algorithm is applied as an estimator in the sequential forward selection (wrapper technique) to select key features. The final obtained feature subset is applied for classification using SVM. The IoTToN network and UNSWNB15 datasets were used to test the model's performance. The performance of the model was compared with other existing state-of-the-art classifiers such as k-nearest neighbors, gradient boosting, random forest, and decision tree. The model had the best quality of the selected feature subset. The results indicate that the proposed model had a better intrusion detection performance with 99%, and 86% accuracy for IoTToN network dataset and UNSWNB15 datasets, respectively. The model can be used as a promising tool for enhancing the classification performance of IDS datasets.