Optimisation of multiple clustering based undersampling using artificial bee colony: Application to improved detection of obfuscated patterns without adversarial training

Attack detection is one of the main features required in modern defence systems. Despite the ongoing research, it remains challenging for a typical mechanism like network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS) to catch up with evolving adversarial attacks. They specifically aim to confuse a machine-learning based predictor. Without the knowledge of adversarial patterns, the best approach is generalising signatures learned from a dataset of legitimate connections and known intrusions. This work focuses on analysing non-payload traffics so that the resulting techniques can be exploited to a range of network-based applications. It investigates a novel means to deal with the problem of imbalanced classes. An optimised undersampling method is introduced to select a subset of majority-class representatives initially created through an ensemble clustering procedure. A weighted combination of criteria representing distributions within and between classes is proposed as the objective function for a global optimisation using the artificial bee colony (ABC). This approach usually outperforms its baselines and other state-of-the-art undersampling models, with ABC being more effective using the global best strategy than a random selection of solutions or an iterative greedy search. The paper also details the parameter analysis offering a heuristic guide for potential taking up of the proposed techniques.