Comparative analysis of deep learning and traditional methods for IoT botnet detection using a multi-model framework across diverse datasets

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has created unprecedented cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with botnets emerging as a critical threat to network infrastructure. This study focuses on traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches, proposes a novel ensemble framework to address these issues, integrating Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), Random Forest (RF), and Logistic Regression (LR) via a weighted soft-voting mechanism. Our approach introduces a Quantile Uniform transformation to reduce feature skewness, a multi-layered feature selection method to enhance discriminative power, an individual performance of deep learning-traditional machine learning and a hybrid models (ensemble models) for robust detection. Evaluated on BOT-IOT, CICIOT2023, and IOT23 datasets, the framework achieves 100% accuracy on BOT-IOT, 99.2% on CICIOT2023, and 91.5% on IOT23, outperforming state-of-the-art models by up to 6.2%. These contributions advance IoT security by enabling scalable, high-performance detection adaptable to diverse network scenarios, with practical optimizations for real-world deployment.