Applied Sciences, Vol. 15, Pages 12647: MCH-Ensemble: Minority Class Highlighting Ensemble Method for Class Imbalance in Network Intrusion Detection

Applied Sciences doi: 10.3390/app152312647

Authors:
Sumin Oh
Seoyoung Sohn
Chaewon Kim
Minseo Park

As cyber threats such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks continue to rise, network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) have become essential components of cybersecurity defense. Although machine learning is widely applied to network intrusion detection, its performance often deteriorates due to the extreme class imbalance present in real-world data. This imbalance causes models to become biased and unable to detect critical attack instances. To address this issue, we propose MCH-Ensemble (Minority Class Highlighting Ensemble), an ensemble framework designed to improve the detection of minority attack classes. The method constructs multiple balanced subsets through random under-sampling and trains base learners, including decision tree, XGBoost, and LightGBM models. Features of correctly predicted attack samples are then amplified by adding a constant value, producing a boosting-like effect that enhances minority class representation. The highlighted subsets are subsequently combined to train a random forest meta-model, which leverages bagging to capture diverse and fine-grained decision boundaries. Experimental evaluations on the UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017, and WSN-DS datasets demonstrate that MCH-Ensemble effectively mitigates class imbalance and achieves superior recognition of DoS attacks. The proposed method achieves enhanced performance compared with those reported previously. On the UNSW-NB15 and CIC-IDS2017 datasets, it achieves improvements in accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) by ~1.2% and ~0.61%, ~9.8% and 0.77%, ~0.7% and ~0.56%, ~5.3% and 0.66%, and ~0.1% and ~0.06%, respectively. In addition, it achieves these improvements by ~0.17%, ~1.66%, ~0.11%, ~0.88%, and ~0.06%, respectively, on the WSN-DS dataset. These findings indicate that the proposed framework offers a robust and accurate approach to intrusion detection, contributing to the development of reliable cybersecurity systems in highly imbalanced network environments.

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