A Novel Technique for Improvement of Intrusion Detection via Combining Random Forrest and Genetic Algorithm

As computer networks grow, so attacks and intrusions to these networks are increased. In order to have a fully secure computer network, one needs ‘intrusion detection systems’ (IDS) on top of firewalls. The goal of using an IDS is to supervise the abnormal activities and differentiate between normal and abnormal activities in a host system or in a network. An efficient IDS has high detection rate while keeping a low false alarm rate. In this paper, a new approach to classify KDD-Cup-99 data set using a combination of random forest method and genetic algorithm is presented. The purpose is to increase the speed of learning and test phases while improving the accuracy. Random forest is an ensemble learning method based on decision trees. Due to its relatively simple structure and good performance, it is used in many supervised learning applications.  However, like all tree based machine learning algorithms, having too many categorical features, can be a problem both for the speed and accuracy. This is exactly the case with the problem in hand, i.e. intrusion detection; many of the features are in the form of categorical data. For example, in R language, the maximum number of definable categorical features for random forest is 53. The contribution of this work is resolving this issue with the aid of Genetic Algorithm (GA). In this research information gain as a measure of importance is defined and the number of features is reduced based on genetic algorithm.