IGRF-RFE: a hybrid feature selection method for MLP-based network intrusion detection on UNSW-NB15 dataset

Abstract The effectiveness of machine learning models can be significantly averse to redundant and irrelevant features present in the large dataset which can cause drastic performance degradation. This paper proposes IGRF-RFE: a hybrid feature selection method tasked for multi-class network anomalies using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network. IGRF-RFE exploits the qualities of both a filter method for its speed and a wrapper method for its relevance search. In the first phase of our approach, we use a combination of two filter methods, information gain (IG) and random forest (RF) respectively, to reduce the feature subset search space. By combining these two filter methods, the influence of less important…