Open Access

ARTICLE

A Network Traffic Classification Model Based on Metric Learning

Mo Chen¹, Xiaojuan Wang^{1, *}, Mingshu He¹, Lei Jin¹, Khalid Javeed², Xiaojun Wang³

1 Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China.
2 Department of Computer Engineering, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
3 School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.

* Corresponding Author: Xiaojuan Wang. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 64(2), 941-959. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.09802

Received 19 January 2020; Accepted 11 April 2020; Issue published 10 June 2020

Abstract

Attacks on websites and network servers are among the most critical threats in network security. Network behavior identification is one of the most effective ways to identify malicious network intrusions. Analyzing abnormal network traffic patterns and traffic classification based on labeled network traffic data are among the most effective approaches for network behavior identification. Traditional methods for network traffic classification utilize algorithms such as Naive Bayes, Decision Tree and XGBoost. However, network traffic classification, which is required for network behavior identification, generally suffers from the problem of low accuracy even with the recently proposed deep learning models. To improve network traffic classification accuracy thus improving network intrusion detection rate, this paper proposes a new network traffic classification model, called ArcMargin, which incorporates metric learning into a convolutional neural network (CNN) to make the CNN model more discriminative. ArcMargin maps network traffic samples from the same category more closely while samples from different categories are mapped as far apart as possible. The metric learning regularization feature is called additive angular margin loss, and it is embedded in the object function of traditional CNN models. The proposed ArcMargin model is validated with three datasets and is compared with several other related algorithms. According to a set of classification indicators, the ArcMargin model is proofed to have better performances in both network traffic classification tasks and open-set tasks. Moreover, in open-set tasks, the ArcMargin model can cluster unknown data classes that do not exist in the previous training dataset.

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Citations