A novel attention-based feature learning and optimal deep learning approach for network intrusion detection

Rapid technological advances and network progress has occurred in recent decades, as has the global growth of services via the Internet. Consequently, piracy has become more prevalent, and many modern systems have been infiltrated, making it vital to build information security tools to identify new threats. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a critical information security technology that detects network fluctuations with the help of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches. However, conventional techniques could be more effective in dealing with advanced attacks. So, this paper proposes an efficient DL approach for network intrusion detection (NID) using an optimal weight-based deep neural network (OWDNN). The network traffic data was initially collected from three openly available datasets: NSL-KDD, CSE-CIC-IDS2018 and UNSW-NB15. Then preprocessing was carried out on the collected data based on missing values imputation, one-hot encoding, and normalization. After that, the data under-sampling process is performed using the butterfly-optimized k-means clustering (BOKMC) algorithm to balance the unbalanced dataset. The relevant features from the balanced dataset are selected using inception version 3 with multi-head attention (IV3MHA) mechanism to reduce the computation burden of the classifier. After that, the dimensionality of the selected feature is reduced based on principal component analysis (PCA). Finally, the classification is done using OWDNN, which classifies the network traffic as normal and anomalous. Experiments on NSL-KDD, CSE-CIC-IDS2018 and UNSW-NB15 datasets show that the OWDNN performs better than the other ID methods.