Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Techniques for IoT Anomaly Detection Using the NSL-KDD Dataset

With billions of IoT (Internet of Things) devices populating various emerging applications across the world, detecting anomalies on these devices has become incredibly important. Advanced Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are trained to detect abnormal network traffic, and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to create detection models. In this paper, the NSL-KDD dataset was adopted to comparatively study the performance and efficiency of IoT anomaly detection models. The dataset was developed for various research purposes and is especially useful for anomaly detection. This data was used with typical machine learning algorithms including eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) to identify and classify any anomalies present within the IoT applications. Our research results show that the XGBoost algorithm outperformed both the SVM and DCNN algorithms achieving the highest accuracy. In our research, each algorithm was assessed based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Furthermore, we obtained interesting results on the execution time taken for each algorithm when running the anomaly detection. Precisely, the XGBoost algorithm was 425.53% faster when compared to the SVM algorithm and 2,075.49% faster than the DCNN algorithm. According to our experimental testing, XGBoost is the most accurate and efficient method.