Semi-Supervised Learning with Entropy Filtering for Intrusion Detection in Asymmetrical IoT Systems

The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) systems has brought serious security concerns, especially in asymmetrical environments where device capabilities and communication flows vary widely. Many machine-learning-based intrusion detection systems struggle to address noise, uncertainty, and class imbalance. For that reason, intensive data preprocessing procedures were required. These challenges are in real-world data. In this work, we introduce a semi-supervised learning approach that uses entropy-based uncertainty filtering to improve intrusion detection in IoT environments. By dynamically identifying uncertain predictions from tree-based classifiers, we retain only high-confidence results during training. Later, confident samples from the uncertain set are used to retrain the model through a self-training loop. We evaluate this method using three diverse and benchmark datasets named RT-IoT2022, CICIoT2023, and CICIoMT2024, which include up to 34 different attack types. The experimental results reveal that XGBoost and Random Forest outperformed other tree-based models while maintaining their robustness when predicting attacks in the IoT environment. In addition, our proposed model was compared with other models proposed by researchers in the field, and the findings confirmed that our model presented promising results.