Improving the performance of neural networks with random forest in detecting network intrusions

Neural Networks such as RBFN and BPNN have been widely studied in the area of network intrusion detection, with the purpose of detecting a variety of network anomalies (e.g., worms, malware). In real-world applications, however, the performance of these neural networks is dynamic regarding the use of different datasets. One of the reasons is that there are some redundant features for the dataset. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we propose an approach of combining Neural Networks with Random Forest to improve the accuracy of detecting network intrusions. In particular, we design an intelligent anomaly detection system that uses the algorithm of Random Forest in the process of feature selection and selects an appropriate algorithm in an adaptive way. In the evaluation, we conducted two major experiments using the KDD1999 dataset and a real dataset respectively. The experimental results indicate that Random Forest can enhance the performance of Neural Networks by identifying important and closely related features and that our developed system can select a better algorithm intelligently. Copyright © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.