Decision tree classifier for network intrusion detection with GA-based feature selection

Machine Learning techniques such as Genetic Algorithms and Decision Trees have been applied to the field of intrusion detection for more than a decade. Machine Learning techniques can learn normal and anomalous patterns from training data and generate classifiers that then are used to detect attacks on computer systems. In general, the input data to classifiers is in a high dimension feature space, but not all of features are relevant to the classes to be classified. In this paper, we use a genetic algorithm to select a subset of input features for decision tree classifiers, with a goal of increasing the detection rate and decreasing the false alarm rate in network intrusion detection. We used the KDDCUP 99 data set to train and test the decision tree classifiers. The experiments show that the resulting decision trees can have better performance than those built with all available features.