BYDSEX: Binary Young's double-slit experiment optimizer with adaptive crossover for feature selection: Investigating performance issues of network intrusion detection

Contemporary advancements in technology provide vast quantities of data with large dimensions, leading to high computing burdens. These big data quantities suffer from irrelevant, redundant, and noisy features. Hence, Feature Selection (FS) has become a crucial task to identify the optimal subsets of features. This research proposes a Binary version of Young's Double-Slit Experiment optimizer (BYDSE) with crossover operation (BYDSEX) for tackling FS issues. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm employs the V-shaped transfer function to convert continuous solutions generated by the standard YDSE into binary ones. To assess the new solutions, we employ a well-known wrapper approach, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), which uses the Euclidean distance metric. We integrate an adaptive crossover with a bitwise AND operation into the suggested algorithm to enhance its exploration and population diversity. Moreover, the bitwise AND operation transfers the most informative and beneficial features to the new solutions. We compared BYDSEX with nine of the most recent and powerful algorithms using 31 large-scale datasets to demonstrate its efficacy. Moreover, our BYDSEX optimizer is utilized to detect the DDoS attacks faced by most IoT devices and contemporary technologies, using six datasets extracted from CIC-DDoS2019 and NSL-KDD. Various performance metrics are utilized to assess the algorithms, such as the accuracy, the selected feature size the fitness values, the fitness values, and the time. Two statistical tests are carried out, like paired-samples T and the Wilcoxon signed-rank. BYDSEX achieved superior results compared to its competitors for most of the datasets. Furthermore, BYDSEX obtains average accuracy values of 99.78%, 99.89%, 99.69% and 99.48% for LDAP and MSSQL, NETBIOS and NSL-KDD, respectively.