Intelligent Intrusion Detection in IoT: Integrating Machine Learning and Feature Automation

The rapid growth of the internet of things (IoT) raises serious security concerns, demanding effective protection from cyber-attacks. Intrusion detection depends on identifying key features, but despite advances in automation, manual feature selection remains necessary, limiting scalability. To address this limitation, we introduced a hybrid feature selection method that combines filter and wrapper techniques to automatically select important features and enhance the efficiency of machine learning (ML) models for intrusion detection tasks. We utilized the mutual information (MI) algorithm as the filter method and recursive feature elimination (RFE) as the wrapper method. We evaluated the performance of the proposed model on publicly available datasets, HIKARI2021 and UNSW-NB15. We compared the results with several existing methods, and our approach outperformed the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in terms of accuracy and training time. We presented comprehensive results, including both quantitative and qualitative analysis, to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.