PSO-ACO-based bi-phase lightweight intrusion detection system combined with GA optimized ensemble classifiers

Features within the dataset carry a significant role; however, resource utilization, prediction-time, and model weight are increased by utilizing high-dimensional data in intrusion-detection paradigm. This paper aims to design a novel lightweight intrusion detection system in two phases utilizing a swarm intelligence-based technique. In 1st-phase, essential features are selected using particle swarm optimization algorithm by considering imbalanced dataset. Ant colony optimization algorithm is utilized in 2nd-phase for extracting information-rich and uncorrelated features. Additionally, genetic algorithm is employed for fine-tuning each detection model. Proposed model’s performance is evaluated on different base and ensemble classifiers, and it is observed that xgboost achieves best accuracy with 90.38%, 92.63%, and 97.87% on NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and CSE-CIC-IDS2018 datasets, respectively. The proposed model also outperforms other traditional dimensionality reduction and state-of-the-art approaches with statistical validation. This paper also analyses objective function of each metaheuristic algorithm used in this paper, applying convergence graphs, box, and swarm plots.