Advancing Artificial Intelligence of Things Security: Integrating Feature Selection and Deep Learning for Real-Time Intrusion Detection

The size of data transmitted through various communication systems has recently increased due to technological advancements in the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). IoT communications rely on intrusion detection systems (IDS) to ensure secure and reliable data transmission, as traditional security mechanisms, such as firewalls and encryption, remain susceptible to attacks. An effective IDS is crucial as evolving threats continue to expose new security vulnerabilities. This study proposes an integrated approach combining feature selection methods and principal component analysis (PCA) with advanced deep learning (DL) models for real-time intrusion detection, significantly improving both computational efficiency and accuracy compared to previous methods. Specifically, five feature selection methods (correlation-based feature subset selection (CFS), Pearson analysis, gain ratio (GR), information gain (IG) and symmetrical uncertainty (SU)) were integrated with PCA to optimise feature dimensionality and enhance predictive performance. Three classifiers—artificial neural networks (ANNs), deep neural networks (DNNs), and TabNet–were evaluated on the RT-IoT2022 dataset. The ANN classifier combined with Pearson analysis and PCA achieved the highest intrusion detection accuracy of 99.7%, demonstrating substantial performance improvements over ANN alone (92%) and TabNet (94%) without feature selection. Key features identified by Pearson analysis included id.resp_p, service, fwd_init_window_size and flow_SYN_flag_count, which significantly contributed to the performance gains. These results indicate that combining Pearson analysis with PCA consistently improves classification performance across multiple models. Furthermore, the deployment of classifiers directly on the original dataset decreased the accuracy, emphasising the importance of feature selection in enhancing AIoT and IoT security. This predictive model strengthens IDS capabilities, enabling early threat detection and proactive mitigation strategies against cyberattacks in real-time AIoT environments.