Attack classification using feature selection techniques: a comparative study

Abstract

The goal of securing a network is to protect the information flowing through the network and to ensure the security of intellectual as well as sensitive data for the underlying application. To accomplish this goal, security mechanism such as Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used, that analyzes the network traffic and extract useful information for inspection. It identifies various patterns and signatures from the data and use them as features for attack detection and classification. Various Machine Learning (ML) techniques are used to design IDS for attack detection and classification. All the features captured from the network packets do not contribute in detecting or classifying attack. Therefore, the objective of our research work is to study the effect of various feature selection techniques on the performance of IDS. Feature selection techniques select relevant features and group them into subsets. This paper implements Chi-Square, Information Gain (IG), and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) feature selection techniques with ML classifiers namely Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, k-nearest neighbours, Logistic Regression, and Artificial Neural Networks. The methods are experimented on NSL-KDD dataset and comparative analysis of results is presented.