Dual-IDS: A bagging-based gradient boosting decision tree model for network anomaly intrusion detection system

Abstract

The mission of an intrusion detection system (IDS) is to monitor network activities and assess whether or not they are malevolent. Specifically, anomaly-based IDS can discover irregular activities by discriminating between normal and anomalous deviations. Nonetheless, existing strategies for detecting anomalies generally rely on single classification models that are still incapable of reducing the false alarm rate and increasing the detection rate. This study introduces a dual ensemble model by combining two existing ensemble techniques, such as bagging and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT). Multiple dual ensemble schemes involving various fine-tuned GBDT algorithms such as gradient boosting machine (GBM), LightGBM, CatBoost, and XGBoost, are extensively appraised using multiple publicly available data sets, such as NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and HIKARI-2021. The results indicate that the proposed technique is a reasonable solution for the anomaly-based IDS task. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the combination of Bagging and GBM is superior to all alternative combination schemes. In addition, the proposed dual ensemble (e.g., Bagging-GBM) is considerably more competitive than similar techniques reported in the current literature.