Performance Analysis of Machine Learning Classifiers for Intrusion Detection using UNSW-NB15 Dataset

Abstract

With the advancement of internet technology, the numbers of threats are also rising exponentially. To reduce the impact of these threats, researchers have proposed many solutions for intrusion detection. In the literature, various machine learning classifiers are trained on older datasets for intrusion detection which limits their detection accuracy. So, there is a need to train the machine learning classifiers on latest dataset. In this paper, UNSW-NB15, the latest dataset is used to train machine learning classifiers. On the basis of theoretical analysis, taxonomy is proposed in terms of lazy and eager learners. From this proposed taxonomy, KNearest Neighbors (KNN), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR) and Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers are selected for training. The performance of these classifiers is tested in terms of Accuracy, Mean Squared Error (MSE), Precision, Recall, F1-Score, True Positive Rate (TPR) and False Positive Rate (FPR) on UNSW-NB15 dataset and comparative analysis of these machine learning classifiers is carried out. The experimental results show that RF classifier outperforms other classifiers.