AHGA-SA: A Novel Adaptive Hybrid Framework for Feature Selection in IoT-Oriented Intrusion Detection with Explainable AI

The increasing connectivity of Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented environments has made them more vulnerable to cyberattacks, requiring intrusion-detection systems (IDSs) to ensure their secure and reliable operation. The feature selection (FS) process of an IDS affects its performance, as effective FS can enhance detection accuracy and reduce the computational cost and model complexity. This paper presents Adaptive Hybrid Genetic Algorithm-Simulated Annealing (AHGA-SA) as an FS framework that integrates the global search ability of a genetic algorithm and the local exploitation ability of simulated annealing. AHGA-SA aims to find compact, informative feature subsets in high-dimensional intrusion-detection datasets at an acceptable computational cost while maintaining detection performance. The experimental results on three recent benchmarks demonstrate feature-space reduction, with classification accuracies of 99.04% on IoTID20 (using 12 features), 98.25% on WUSTL-EHMS (using seven features), and 99.18% on Edge-IIoTset (using nine features). The results also demonstrate reduced training and testing times, central processing unit usage, resident set size overhead, and subset size compared to the baseline. Furthermore, Shapley additive explanations, as an explainable artificial intelligence technique, are applied to explain the model’s predictions and to show the contribution of the selected features to the IDS decision-making process.