Stacked autoencoder with weighted loss function for intrusion detection in IoT application

The fast increase of network traffic in recent times causes significant detection of intrusions in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Currently, Deep Learning (DL) models play a crucial role in cyber security for malicious identification and intrusion detection in IoT networks. The existing methods have drawbacks like overfitting, data imbalance, and not completely capturing complex dependencies and relationships among input and features that are significant for intrusion detection. To overcome these limitations, Stacked Autoencoder (SAE) with weighted loss function is proposed for effective Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The SAE includes weighted loss function to minimize the overfitting issue and finally, the One Class-Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) is used in the classification layer to classify the intrusions. The database used for intrusion detection in IoT environment are Bot-IoT and ToN-IoT databases, which undergo pre-processing by using standard scalar and min–max normalization to remove duplicates and inconsistent data in the databases. Then, the optimal features are selected by using firefly optimizer which selects active features values for classification. In the resulting phase, the stacked autoencoder obtains 99.99%, and 99.70% of classification accuracy on the Bot-IoT and ToN-IoT databases, respectively, which are superior while compared to the traditional autoencoder model.