A Novel Semi-Supervised Adaboost Technique for Network Anomaly Detection

With the developing of Internet, network intrusion has become more and more common. Quickly identifying and preventing network attacks is getting increasingly more important and difficult. Machine learning techniques have already proven to be robust methods in detecting malicious activities and network threats. Ensemble-based and semi-supervised learning methods are some of the areas that receive most attention in machine learning today. However relatively little attention has been given in combining these methods. To overcome such limitations, this paper proposes a novel network anomaly detection method by using a combination of a tri-training approach with Adaboost algorithms. The bootstrap samples of tri-training are replaced by three different Adaboost algorithms to create the diversity. We run 30 iteration for every simulation to obtain the average results. Simulations indicate that our proposed semi-supervised Adaboost algorithm is reproducible and consistent over a different number of runs. It outperforms other state-of-the-art learning algorithms, even with a small part of labeled data in the training phase. Specifically, it has a very short execution time and a good balance between the detection rate as well as the false-alarm rate.