Abstract:

With the continuous development of Internet technology, network security is garnering increasing attention. Network anomalous traffic detection can provide an effective guarantee for blocking network attacks. However, to accurately detect anomalous traffic in a network, analyzing large volumes of data is usually required. Analyzing this data not only consumes substantial computational resources and reduces real-time detection capability, but it may also reduce the overall accuracy of detection. To solve these problems, we propose a network anomaly traffic detection method based on ensemble feature selection. Specifically, we use five different feature selection algorithms to design a voting mechanism for selecting feature subsets. Three different machine learning algorithms (Naive Bayesian, Decision Tree, XGBoost) are used to evaluate the feature selection algorithm, and the best algorithm is selected to detect abnormal network traffic. The experimental results show that the runtime of the proposed method is 84.38% less than the original data set on the optimal feature subset selected by the proposed approach, and the average accuracy is 16.93% higher than that of the single feature selection algorithm.

Key words: anomaly traffic detection, ensemble feature selection, voting mechanism