Hybrid Model for Network Anomaly Detection with Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and Tabtransformer

Abstract

Last decades have witnessed the monumental growth of Inter-net applications, and the network security fields have attracted increasing interests as it has become a necessity due to proliferation of information technologies in everyday life. Net-work anomaly detection aims to detect the potential anomalous behavior in traffic data, which is critical for detecting and reacting to the presence of attacks in the network. In this pa-per, we present our solution for the ICASSP 2021 Network Anomaly Detection Challenge (NAD) challenge. Firstly, we present our feature extraction method in detecting network anomalies, as efficiently extracting the discriminate features from the traffic data over time can be greatly helpful to improve the anomaly detection performance. Secondly, both gradient boosting decision trees and TabTransformer-Based classification model are trained for the multi-class classification task. The TabTransformer is based on self-attention and can transform the categorical feature’ embeddings into robust contextual embeddings, thus, can achieve higher prediction accuracy. Finally, we ensemble the results to improve the performance further. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, extensive experiments have been conducted on the NAD datasets. Our approach achieves the score of 0.625 and ranked as 2nd place in the final leaderboard.