A comparative study of Machine learning Algorithms on the UNSW-NB 15 Dataset

Abstract

The world has experienced a radical change due to the internet. Internet became a crucial element in our daily life, therefore, the security of our DATA could be threatened at any time. This safety is handled using systems to detect network intrusion called Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Machine learning techniques are being implemented to improve these systems. In order to enhance the performance of IDS, different classification algorithms are applied to detect various types of attacks. Choosing a good one for building IDS is not an easy task. The best method is to test the performance of the different classification algorithms. Nevertheless, most researchers have focused on the confusion matrix as measurements of classification performance. Therefore, many papers use this matrix to present a detailed comparison with the dataset, data preprocessing, feature selection technique, algorithms classification and performance evaluation. The goal of this paper is to present a comparison of application of different Machine Learning algorithms used to build and improve intrusion detection systems in terms of confusion matrix, accuracy, recall, precision, FAR, specificity and sensitivity using the UNSW-NB15 Dataset. Furthermore, we introduce some lesson learnt to shoot more researchers in their future works.