Evaluation of Selected Stacked Ensemble Models for the Optimal Multi-class Cyber-Attacks Detection

Abstract

The significant rise in the frequency and sophistication of cyber-attacks and their diversity necessitated various researchers to develop strong and effective approaches to address recurring cyber threat challenges. This study evaluated the performance of three selected meta-learning models for optimal multi-class detection of cyber-attacks using the University of New South Wales 2015 Network benchmark (UNSW-NB15) Intrusion Dataset. The results of this study show and confirm the ability of the three base models; Naive Bayes, C4.5 Decision Tree, and K-Nearest Neighbor for solving multi-class problems. It further affirms the knack of the duo of feature selection techniques and stacked ensemble learning to optimize ML models' performances. The stacking of the predictions of the information gain base models with Model Decision Tree meta-algorithm recorded the most improved and optimal cyber-attacks detection accuracy and Mattew's correlation Coefficient than the stacking with the Multiple Model Trees (MMT) and Multi Response Linear regression (MLR) Meta algorithms.