An optimal and stable feature selection approach for traffic classification based on multi-criterion fusion

• Propose two new metrics to evaluate the existing FS for network traffic classification.
• Propose a robust multi-criterion fusion-based to preserve the optimal and stable features.
• Propose an adaptive threshold based maximum entropy to extract the stable features.
• Propose a wrapper method based on random forest to obtain the final optimal subset.
• Improve the performance of traffic classification across different period and networks.

There is significant interest in the network management community about the need to identify the most optimal and stable features for network traffic data. In practice, feature selection techniques are used as a pre-processing step to eliminate meaningless features, and also as a tool to reveal the set of optimal features. Unfortunately, such techniques are often sensitive to a small variation in the traffic data. Thus, obtaining a stable feature set is crucial in enhancing the confidence of network operators. This paper proposes an robust approach, called the Global Optimization Approach (GOA), to identify both optimal and stable features, relying on multi-criterion fusion-based feature selection technique and an information-theoretic method. The proposed GOA first combines multiple well-known FS techniques to yield a possible optimal feature subsets across different traffic datasets; then the proposed adaptive threshold, which is based on entropy to extract the stable features. A new goodness measure is proposed within a Random Forest framework to estimate the final optimum feature subset. Experimental studies on network traffic data in spatial and temporal domains show that the proposed GOA approach outperforms the commonly used feature selection techniques for traffic classification task.