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Hauptverfasser: Subasi, Omer, Cree, Johnathan, Manzano, Joseph, Peterson, Elena
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04009
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author Subasi, Omer
Cree, Johnathan
Manzano, Joseph
Peterson, Elena
author_facet Subasi, Omer
Cree, Johnathan
Manzano, Joseph
Peterson, Elena
contents There has been a large number of studies in interpretable and explainable ML for cybersecurity, in particular, for intrusion detection. Many of these studies have significant amount of overlapping and repeated evaluations and analysis. At the same time, these studies overlook crucial model, data, learning process, and utility related issues and many times completely disregard them. These issues include the use of overly complex and opaque ML models, unaccounted data imbalances and correlated features, inconsistent influential features across different explanation methods, the inconsistencies stemming from the constituents of a learning process, and the implausible utility of explanations. In this work, we empirically demonstrate these issues, analyze them and propose practical solutions in the context of feature-based model explanations. Specifically, we advise avoiding complex opaque models such as Deep Neural Networks and instead using interpretable ML models such as Decision Trees as the available intrusion datasets are not difficult for such interpretable models to classify successfully. Then, we bring attention to the binary classification metrics such as Matthews Correlation Coefficient (which are well-suited for imbalanced datasets. Moreover, we find that feature-based model explanations are most often inconsistent across different settings. In this respect, to further gauge the extent of inconsistencies, we introduce the notion of cross explanations which corroborates that the features that are determined to be impactful by one explanation method most often differ from those by another method. Furthermore, we show that strongly correlated data features and the constituents of a learning process, such as hyper-parameters and the optimization routine, become yet another source of inconsistent explanations. Finally, we discuss the utility of feature-based explanations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_04009
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Critical Assessment of Interpretable and Explainable Machine Learning for Intrusion Detection
Subasi, Omer
Cree, Johnathan
Manzano, Joseph
Peterson, Elena
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
There has been a large number of studies in interpretable and explainable ML for cybersecurity, in particular, for intrusion detection. Many of these studies have significant amount of overlapping and repeated evaluations and analysis. At the same time, these studies overlook crucial model, data, learning process, and utility related issues and many times completely disregard them. These issues include the use of overly complex and opaque ML models, unaccounted data imbalances and correlated features, inconsistent influential features across different explanation methods, the inconsistencies stemming from the constituents of a learning process, and the implausible utility of explanations. In this work, we empirically demonstrate these issues, analyze them and propose practical solutions in the context of feature-based model explanations. Specifically, we advise avoiding complex opaque models such as Deep Neural Networks and instead using interpretable ML models such as Decision Trees as the available intrusion datasets are not difficult for such interpretable models to classify successfully. Then, we bring attention to the binary classification metrics such as Matthews Correlation Coefficient (which are well-suited for imbalanced datasets. Moreover, we find that feature-based model explanations are most often inconsistent across different settings. In this respect, to further gauge the extent of inconsistencies, we introduce the notion of cross explanations which corroborates that the features that are determined to be impactful by one explanation method most often differ from those by another method. Furthermore, we show that strongly correlated data features and the constituents of a learning process, such as hyper-parameters and the optimization routine, become yet another source of inconsistent explanations. Finally, we discuss the utility of feature-based explanations.
title A Critical Assessment of Interpretable and Explainable Machine Learning for Intrusion Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04009