A filter feature selection algorithm based on mutual information for intrusion detection

Abstract

For a large number of network attacks, feature selection is used to improve intrusion detection efficiency. A new mutual information algorithm of the redundant penalty between features (RPFMI) algorithmwith the ability to select optimal features is proposed in this paper. Three factors are considered in this new algorithm: the redundancy between features, the impact between selected features and classes and the relationship between candidate features and classes. An experiment is conducted using the proposed algorithmfor intrusion detection on the KDD Cup 99 intrusion dataset and the Kyoto 2006+ dataset. Compared with other algorithms, the proposed algorithm has a much higher accuracy rate (i.e., 99.772%) on the DOS data and can achieve better performance on remote-to-login (R2L) data and user-to-root (U2R) data. For the Kyoto 2006+ dataset, the proposed algorithm possesses the highest accuracy rate (i.e., 97.749%) among the other algorithms. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a highly effective feature selection method in the intrusion detection.