Network Intrusion Detection and Classification System: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach

Abstract: Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are crucial for computer security, as they identify and counteract malicious activities within computer networks. Anomaly-based IDSs, specifically, use classification models trained on historical data to detect these harmful activities. This paper proposes an enhanced IDS based on 3-level training and testing of machine learning models, feature selection, resampling, and normalization using Decision Tree, Gaussian Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbours, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine. In the first stage, the six models are trained and evaluated using the original datasets after pre-processing. In the second stage, the models are built and tested with a resampled version of the dataset using the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE). In the third stage, the models are trained and tested with a dataset that has been both resampled and normalized using the standard scaling method. We employ the feature importance technique using the random forest model to select the essential features from NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets. The results of our study surpass previous related research, with the decision tree achieving an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 99.99% on the UNSW-NB15 dataset. Additionally, the decision tree recorded an accuracy of 99.98%, precision of 99.97%, recall of 99.97%, and F1 score of 99.99% on the NSL-KDD dataset.