Machine Learning-Based Intrusion Detection: Feature Selection versus Feature Extraction

TL;DR

This paper compares feature selection and feature extraction techniques for machine learning-based intrusion detection in IoT networks, analyzing their performance, complexity, and reliability using the UNSW-NB15 dataset.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison and practical guidelines for choosing feature reduction methods in IoT intrusion detection systems.

Findings

Feature selection yields better detection accuracy and lower runtime.

Feature extraction is more reliable with small feature sets.

Feature extraction is less sensitive to the number of features.

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) has been playing an important role in many sectors, such as smart cities, smart agriculture, smart healthcare, and smart manufacturing. However, IoT devices are highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which may result in security breaches and data leakages. To effectively prevent these attacks, a variety of machine learning-based network intrusion detection methods for IoT networks have been developed, which often rely on either feature extraction or feature selection techniques for reducing the dimension of input data before being fed into machine learning models. This aims to make the detection complexity low enough for real-time operations, which is particularly vital in any intrusion detection systems. This paper provides a comprehensive comparison between these two feature reduction methods of intrusion detection in terms of various performance metrics, namely, precision rate, recall rate, detection accuracy, as well as runtime complexity, in the presence of the modern UNSW-NB15 dataset as well as both binary and multiclass classification. For example, in general, the feature selection method not only provides better detection performance but also lower training and inference time compared to its feature extraction counterpart, especially when the number of reduced features K increases. However, the feature extraction method is much more reliable than its selection counterpart, particularly when K is very small, such as K = 4. Additionally, feature extraction is less sensitive to changing the number of reduced features K than feature selection, and this holds true for both binary and multiclass classifications. Based on this comparison, we provide a useful guideline for selecting a suitable intrusion detection type for each specific scenario, as detailed in Tab. 14 at the end of Section IV.