Application of bagging, boosting and stacking to intrusion detection

Abstract

This paper investigates the possibility of using ensemble algorithms to improve the performance of network intrusion detection systems. We use an ensemble of three different methods, bagging, boosting and stacking, in order to improve the accuracy and reduce the false positive rate. We use four different data mining algorithms, naïve bayes, J48 (decision tree), JRip (rule induction) and iBK( nearest neighbour), as base classifiers for those ensemble methods. Our experiment shows that the prototype which implements four base classifiers and three ensemble algorithms achieves an accuracy of more than 99% in detecting known intrusions, but failed to detect novel intrusions with the accuracy rates of around just 60%. The use of bagging, boosting and stacking is unable to significantly improve the accuracy. Stacking is the only method that was able to reduce the false positive rate by a significantly high amount (46.84%); unfortunately, this method has the longest execution time and so is inefficient to implement in the intrusion detection field. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.