Network intrusion detection based on conditional wasserstein variational autoencoder with generative adversarial network and one-dimensional convolutional neural networks

Abstract There is a class-imbalance problem that the number of minority class samples is significantly lower than that of majority class samples in common network traffic datasets. Class-imbalance phenomenon will affect the performance of the classifier and reduce the robustness of the classifier to detect unknown anomaly detection. And the distribution of the continuous features in the dataset does not follow the Gaussian distribution, which will bring great difficulties to intrusion detection. We propose Conditional Wasserstein Variational Autoencoders with Generative Adversarial Network (CWVAEGAN) to solve the class-imbalance phenomenon, CWVAEGAN transform the original dataset through data preprocessing, and then use the improved VAEGAN to generate minority class samples. According to the CWVAEGAN model, an intrusion detection system based on CWVAEGAN and One-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1DCNN), namely CWVAEGAN-1DCNN, is established. By using the examples generated by CWVAEGAN, the problem of intrusion detection on class unbalanced data is solved. Specifically, CWVAEGAN-1DCNN consists of three modules: data preprocessing module, CWVAEGAN, and deep neural network. We evaluate the performance of CWVAEGAN-1DCNN on two benchmark datasets and compared it with the other 16 methods. Experiment results suggest that the performance of CWVAEGAN-1DCNN is better than class-balancing methods, and other advanced methods.