Intrusion Detection Systems Based on Logarithmic Autoencoder and XGBoost

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a network security device that performs real-time monitoring of network transmissions and sends out alarms or takes active response measures when suspicious transmissions are found. In this regard, many researches have combined traditional machine learning models with other optimization algorithms to improve intrusion detection performance. However, although the existing intrusion detection model can effectively improve the performance of the model, there are still problems such as unsatisfactory detection accuracy and data preprocessing operations that may lead to a decrease in accuracy. To solve this problem, in this paper, we have proposed a novel intrusion detection system model based on logarithmic autoencoder (LogAE) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). First, we build LogAE to learn the hidden features of the input data to reconstruct new data similar to the training samples, with the purpose of highlighting important features. It is worth mentioning that LogAE is not necessary to normalize the training data. This is because we add a logarithmic layer to learn this mapping. Then, XGBoost is used as a classifier to identify the data set that combines the original data set with the generated data set. In the experiment, our proposed model is evaluated on the UNSW-NB15 data set and CICIDS2017 data set. Additionally, we use accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and runtime as evaluation metrics. For detection performance, the detection accuracy of our proposed model is 95.11% for UNSW-NB15 and 99.92% for CICIDS2017, which is better than most state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods. Meantime, the runtime of our proposed model is the lowest for UNSW-NB15.