A machine learning approach for improving the performance of network intrusion detection systems

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) are used in analyzing huge data and diagnose anomaly traffic such as DDoS attack; thus, an efficient traffic classification method is necessary for the IDS. The IDS models attempt to decrease false alarm and increase true alarm rates in order to improve the performance accuracy of the system. To resolve this concern, three machine learning algorithms have been tested and evaluated in this research which are decision jungle (DJ), random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM). The main objective is to propose a ML-based network intrusion detection system (ML-based NIDS) model that compares the performance of the three algorithms based on their accuracy and precision of anomaly traffics. The knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) methodology and intrusion detection evaluation dataset (CIC-IDS2017) are used in the testing which both are considered as a benchmark in the evaluation of IDS. The average accuracy results of the SVM is 98.18%, RF is 96.76% and DJ is 96.50% in which the highest accuracy is achieved by the SVM. The average precision results of the SVM is 98.74, RF is 97.96 and DJ is 97.82 in which the SVM got a higher average precision compared with the other two algorithms. The average recall results of the SVM is 95.63, RF is 97.62 and DJ is 95.77 in which the RF achieves the highest average of recall than SVM and DJ. In overall, the SVM algorithm is found to be the best algorithm that can be used to detect an intrusion in the system. © 2021 by the author(s).