Multi-population Diversity-guided Genetic Algorithm for Feature Selection in Network Intrusion Detection

Chunzhen Li

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arXiv · 2605.19864

Multi-population Diversity-guided Genetic Algorithm for Feature Selection in Network Intrusion Detection

Chunzhen Li

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Abstract

Network Intrusion Detection System is a critical means of ensuring cybersecurity. However, existing Genetic Algorithm-based feature selection methods face several limitations when dealing with high-dimensional redundant traffic features. For example, population diversity is difficult to maintain, and evolutionary operators lack guidance. To solve these problems, this study proposes the Multi-Population Diversity-Guided Genetic Algorithm (MPDGGA). First, we build a chained multi-population evolutionary structure. Second, we introduce a diversity-guided operator based on information gain ratio. Experiments on NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and 9 UCI datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms four other advanced multi-population feature selection models. Across the 11 datasets, it attains the highest accuracy on 10 datasets and at least 2.26% of the features were selected.

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Chunzhen Li. 2026-05-19. Multi-population Diversity-guided Genetic Algorithm for Feature Selection in Network Intrusion Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19864

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