Network Intrusion Detection Based on Random Forest and Support Vector Machine

Abstract

The network intrusion detection techniques are important to prevent our system and network from malicious behaviors. In order to improve accuracy of network intrusion detection, machine learning, feature selection and optimization methods have been used, and the result tell us that the combination of machine learning and feature selection can improve accuracy. In this study, we developed a new machine learning approach for predicting network intrusion based on random forest and support vector machine. Since there were many potential features for network intrusion classification, random forest were used for feature selection based on variable importance score. We found that the host-based statistical features of network flow play an important role in predicting network intrusion. The performance of the support vector machine which used the 14 selected features on KDD 99 dataset has been evaluated by comparing it with the total(41) features and popular classifiers. The result showed that the selected features can achieve higher attack detection rate and it can be one of the competitive classifier for network intrusion detection.