Optimized Intrusion Detection in the IoT Through Statistical Selection and Classification with CatBoost and SNN

With the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), interconnected systems are becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, making intrusion detection essential but difficult. The marked imbalance between regular traffic and attacks, as well as the redundancy of variables from multiple sensors and protocols, greatly complicates this task. The study aims to improve the robustness of IoT intrusion detection systems by reducing the risks of overfitting and false negatives through appropriate rebalancing and variable selection strategies. We combine two data rebalancing techniques, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Random Undersampling (RUS), with two feature selection methods, LASSO and Mutual Information, and then evaluate their performance on two classification models: CatBoost and a Simple Neural Network (SNN). The experiments show the superiority of CatBoost, which achieves an accuracy of 82% compared to 80% for SNN, and confirm the effectiveness of SMOTE over RUS, particularly for SNN. The CatBoost + SMOTE + LASSO configuration stands out with a recall of 82.43% and an F1-score of 85.08%, offering the best compromise between detection and reliability. These results demonstrate that combining rebalancing and variable selection techniques significantly enhances the performance and reliability of intrusion detection systems in the IoT, thereby strengthening cybersecurity in connected environments.