Abstract: several studies have suggested that by selecting relevant features for intrusion detection system, it is possible to considerably improve the detection accuracy and performance of the detection engine. Nowadays with the emergence of new technologies such as Cloud Computing or Big Data, large amount of network traffic are generated and the intrusion detection system must dynamically collected and analyzed the data produce by the incoming traffic. However in a large dataset not all features contribute to represent the traffic, therefore reducing and selecting a number of adequate features may improve the speed and accuracy of the intrusion detection system. In this study, a feature selection mechanism has been proposed which aims to eliminate non-relevant features as well as identify the features which will contribute to improve the detection rate, based on the score each features have established during the selection process. To achieve that objective, a recursive feature elimination process was employed and associated with a decision tree based classifier and later on, the suitable relevant features were identified. This approach was applied on the NSL-KDD dataset which is an improved version of the previous KDD 1999 Dataset, scikit-learn that is a machine learning library written in python was used in this paper. Using this approach, relevant features were identified inside the dataset and the accuracy rate was improved. These results lend to support the idea that features selection improve significantly the classifier performance. Understanding the factors that help identify relevant features will allow the design of a better intrusion detection system.

Herve Nkiama, Syed Zainudeen Mohd Said and Muhammad Saidu, “A Subset Feature Elimination Mechanism for Intrusion Detection System” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 7(4), 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070419

@article{Nkiama2016,
title = {A Subset Feature Elimination Mechanism for Intrusion Detection System},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070419},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070419},
year = {2016},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {7},
number = {4},
author = {Herve Nkiama and Syed Zainudeen Mohd Said and Muhammad Saidu}
}