Enhancing intrusion detection accuracy with feature fusion and stacked ensemble approach: a dual-level learning framework
摘要
Machine learning (ML) based algorithms have been extensively utilized to develop intrusion detection systems (IDS) that identify abnormal behaviors within network operations. The exponential growth in network traffic data has intensified the complexity of intrusion analysis, highlighting the limitations of single classifiers in handling massive datasets effectively. Thus, the given paper proposes a novel tree-based stacking ensemble model (SET), integrating five classifiers namely Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision tree (DT), Random forest (RF), Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and Naive Bayes (NB) classifiers, coupled with rigorous input feature scaling, cross-validation, and hyperparameter optimization to minimize overfitting. The proposed model introduces a feature importance fusion mechanism, aggregating importance scores from RF and XGBoost classifiers to select the most discriminative features, thereby improving dimensionality reduction and overall model interpretability. The model’s performance is evaluated on NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets, incorporating robust feature selection to identify critical attributes. Results demonstrate that the proposed model attains the highest accuracy (%) and the lowest false alarm rate (FAR), outperforming existing intrusion detection approaches.