A 3D approach for the visualization of network intrusion detection data

With the increasing threat of cyber attacks, machine learning techniques have been researched extensively in the area of network intrusion detection. Such techniques can potentially provide a means for the real-time automated detection of attacks and abnormal traffic patterns. However, misclassification is a common problem in machine learning techniques for intrusion detection, and a lack of insight into why such misclassification occurs impedes the improvement of machine learning models. This paper presents an approach to visualizing network intrusion detection data in 3D. The purpose of this is to facilitate the understanding of network intrusion detection datasets using a visual representation to reflect the geometric relationship between various categories of network traffic. This can potentially provide useful insight to aid the design of machine learning techniques. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed 3D visualization approach by presenting results of experiments on commonly used network intrusion detection datasets.