SE-DWNet: An Advanced ResNet-Based Model for Intrusion Detection with Symmetric Data Distribution

With the rapid increase in cyber-attacks, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have become essential for network security. However, traditional IDS methods often struggle with class imbalance, leading to asymmetric data distributions that adversely affect detection performance and model generalization. To address this issue and enhance detection accuracy, this paper proposes SE-DWNet, a residual network model incorporating an attention mechanism and one-dimensional depthwise separable convolution, trained on a symmetrically preprocessed dataset using SMOTETomek sampling. First, the feature distributions of the training and test datasets are analyzed using box plots, highlighting the impact of feature difference. To mitigate this difference and restore a more symmetric data distribution, we employ the SMOTETomek integrated sampling method in conjunction with a Focal Loss function. Subsequently, a lightweight residual network, incorporating the SE module and the Res-DWNet module, is designed to improve detection accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on the NSL-KDD, CICIDS2018, and ToN-IoT datasets demonstrate that SE-DWNet outperforms existing neural network-based IDS models, achieving accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score improvements ranging from 0.17% to 5.33%. The results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach in intrusion detection tasks.