Enhancing Intrusion Detection Systems with Dimensionality Reduction and Multi-Stacking Ensemble Techniques

The deployment of intrusion detection systems (IDSs) is essential for protecting network resources and infrastructure against malicious threats. Despite the wide use of various machine learning methods in IDSs, such systems often struggle to achieve optimal performance. The key challenges include the curse of dimensionality, which significantly impacts IDS efficacy, and the limited effectiveness of singular learning classifiers in handling complex, imbalanced, and multi-categorical traffic datasets. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents an innovative approach that integrates dimensionality reduction and stacking ensemble techniques. We employ the LogitBoost algorithm with XGBRegressor for feature selection, complemented by a Residual Network (ResNet) deep learning model for feature extraction. Furthermore, we introduce multi-stacking ensemble (MSE), a novel ensemble method, to enhance attack prediction capabilities. The evaluation on benchmark datasets such as CICIDS2017 and UNSW-NB15 demonstrates that our IDS surpasses current models across various performance metrics.