Feature Selection of Network Intrusion Data using Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

This paper describes the advantages of using Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) for feature selection on network intrusion dataset. Most current Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are unable to detect intrusions in real time because of high dimensional data produced during daily operation. Extracting knowledge from huge data such as intrusion data requires new approach. The more complex the datasets, the higher computation time and the harder they are to be interpreted and analyzed. This paper investigates the performance of feature selection algoritms in network intrusiona data. We used Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimizations (PSO) as feature selection algorithms. When applied to network intrusion datasets, both GA and PSO have significantly reduces the number of features. Our experiments show that GA successfully reduces the number of attributes from 41 to 15 while PSO reduces the number of attributes from 41 to 9. Using k Nearest Neighbour (k-NN) as a classifier,the GA-reduced dataset which consists of 37% of original attributes, has accuracy improvement from 99.28% to 99.70% and its execution time is also 4.8 faster than the execution time of original dataset. Using the same classifier, PSO-reduced dataset which consists of 22% of original attributes, has the fastest execution time (7.2 times faster than the execution time of original datasets). However, its accuracy is slightly reduced 0.02% from 99.28% to 99.26%. Overall, both GA and PSO are good solution as feature selection techniques because theyhave shown very good performance in reducing the number of features significantly while still maintaining and sometimes improving the classification accuracy as well as reducing the computation time.