An efficient intrusion detection method based on LightGBM and autoencoder

Abstract

Due to the insidious characteristics of network intrusion behaviors, developing an efficient intrusion detection system is still a big challenge, especially in the era of big data where the number of traffic and the dimension of each traffic feature are high. Because of the shortcomings of traditional common machine learning algorithms in network intrusion detection, such as insufficient accuracy, a network intrusion detection system based on LightGBM and autoencoder (AE) is proposed. The LightGBM-AE model proposed in this paper includes three steps: data preprocessing, feature selection, and classification. The LightGBM-AE model adopts the LightGBM algorithm for feature selection, and then uses an autoencoder for training and detection. When a set of data containing network intrusion behaviors are inputted into an autoencoder, there is a large reconstruction error between the original input data and the reconstructed data obtained by the autoencoder, which provides a basis for intrusion detection. According to the reconstruction error, an appropriate threshold is set to distinguish symmetrically between normal behavior and attack behavior. The experiment is carried out on the NSL-KDD dataset and implemented using Pytorch. In addition to autoencoder, variational autoencoder (VAE) and denoising autoencoder (DAE) are also used for intrusion detection and are compared with existing machine learning algorithms such as Decision Tree, Random Forest, KNN, GBDT, and XGBoost. The evaluation is carried out through classification evaluation indexes such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score. The experimental results show that the method can efficiently separate the attack behavior from normal behavior according to the reconstruction error. Compared with other methods, the effectiveness and superiority of this method are verified.