Comparative analysis of machine learning algorithms along with classifiers for network intrusion detection

Intrusion detection is one of the challenging problems encountered by the modern network security industry. A network has to be continuously monitored for detecting policy violation or suspicious traffic. So an intrusion detection system needs to be developed which can monitor network for any harmful activities and generate results to the management authority. Data mining can play a massive role in the development of a system which can detect network intrusion. Data mining is a technique through which important information can be extracted from huge data repositories. In order to spot intrusion, the traffic created in the network can be broadly categorized into following two categories- normal and anomalous. In our proposed paper, several classification techniques and machine learning algorithms have been considered to categorize the network traffic. Out of the classification techniques, we have found nine suitable classifiers like BayesNet, Logistic, IBK, J48, PART, JRip, Random Tree, Random Forest and REPTree. Out of the several machine learning algorithms, we have worked on Boosting, Bagging and Blending (Stacking) and compared their accuracies as well. The comparison of these algorithms has been performed using WEKA tool and listed below according to certain performance metrics. Simulation of these classification models has been performed using 10-fold cross validation. NSL-KDD based data set has been used for this simulation in WEKA.