Enhanced anomaly detection in IoT networks via feature fusion and learning-based echo state networks

Abstract

The fast development of internet of things (IoT) networks has led to an increased probability of cyberattacks. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) are needed for identifying unauthorised access and malicious activities in such dynamic environments. However, existing machine learning (ML) models failed to handle the complexity and variability of modern cyber threats. In this work, a hybrid deep learning (DL)-based anomaly detection model is presented for IoT cybersecurity. The model combines three types of features: (i) supervised feature extraction using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to extract the most discriminative features, (ii) unsupervised feature learning through autoencoders to capture latent representations of the input data, and (iii) statistical features such as mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis to learn input characteristics. The fused feature matrix is fed into a learning based echo state network (LBESN) for final detection. The parameters of the LBESN model are tuned using black eagle optimizer (BEO). Experimental results on standard intrusion detection datasets such as UNSW-NB15, KDD99, and InSDN show that the proposed model achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score compared to conventional DL techniques.