An Effective Intrusion Detection Model Based on Random Forest and Neural Networks

Intrusion detection is a very important research domain in network security. Current intrusion detection systems (IDS) especially NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection System) examine all data features to detect intrusions. Also, many machine learning and data mining methods are utilized to fulfill intrusion detection tasks. This paper proposes an effective intrusion detection model that is computationally efficient and effective based on Random Forest based feature selection approach and Neural Networks (NN) model. We firstly utilize random forest method to select the most important features to eliminate the insignificant and/or useless inputs leads to a simplification of the problem, in order to faster and more accurate detection; Secondly, classic NN model is used to learn and detect intrusions using the selected important features. Experimental results on the well-known KDD 1999 dataset demonstrate the proposed hybrid model is actually effective.