A Stacking Ensemble Model with Enhanced Feature Selection for Distributed Denial-of-Service Detection in Software-Defined Networks

The proliferation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks poses a significant threat to network accessibility and performance. Traditional feature selection methods struggle with the complexity of network traffic data, leading to poor detection performance. To address this issue, a Genetic Algorithm Wrapper Feature Selection (GAWFS) is proposed, integrating Chi-squared and Genetic Algorithm (GA) approaches with a correlation method to select the most correlated features. GAWFS effectively reduces feature dimensions, eliminates redundancy, and identifies crucial and correlated features for classification. Detection accuracy is further improved by employing a stacking ensemble model, combining Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as base models, with Random Forest (RF) as the metamodel. The proposed classifier achieves impressive accuracies of 99.86% for training data and 98.89% for test data, representing improvements of approximately 5% and 40%, respectively, over previous studies. The training time was also reduced to 2,593 s, a substantial improvement of approximately 29.92%. Validation on various benchmark datasets confirmed the efficacy of the proposed approach, underscoring the importance of the enhanced feature selection method and the stacking ensemble model against DDoS attacks.