Graph Attention Neural Network for Botnet Detection: Evaluating Autoencoder, VAE and PCA-Based Dimension Reduction

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Hauptverfasser: Wasswa, Hassan, Abbass, Hussein, Lynar, Timothy
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wasswa, Hassan
Abbass, Hussein
Lynar, Timothy
author_facet Wasswa, Hassan
Abbass, Hussein
Lynar, Timothy
contents With the rise of IoT-based botnet attacks, researchers have explored various learning models for detection, including traditional machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. A key advancement involves deploying attention mechanisms to capture long-term dependencies among features, significantly improving detection accuracy. However, most models treat attack instances independently, overlooking inter-instance relationships. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) address this limitation by learning an embedding space via iterative message passing where similar instances are placed closer based on node features and relationships, enhancing classification performance. To further improve detection, attention mechanisms have been embedded within GNNs, leveraging both long-range dependencies and inter-instance connections. However, transforming the high dimensional IoT attack datasets into a graph structured dataset poses challenges, such as large graph structures leading computational overhead. To mitigate this, this paper proposes a framework that first reduces dimensionality of the NetFlow-based IoT attack dataset before transforming it into a graph dataset. We evaluate three dimension reduction techniques--Variational Autoencoder (VAE-encoder), classical autoencoder (AE-encoder), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA)--and compare their effects on a Graph Attention neural network (GAT) model for botnet attack detection
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph Attention Neural Network for Botnet Detection: Evaluating Autoencoder, VAE and PCA-Based Dimension Reduction
Wasswa, Hassan
Abbass, Hussein
Lynar, Timothy
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
With the rise of IoT-based botnet attacks, researchers have explored various learning models for detection, including traditional machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. A key advancement involves deploying attention mechanisms to capture long-term dependencies among features, significantly improving detection accuracy. However, most models treat attack instances independently, overlooking inter-instance relationships. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) address this limitation by learning an embedding space via iterative message passing where similar instances are placed closer based on node features and relationships, enhancing classification performance. To further improve detection, attention mechanisms have been embedded within GNNs, leveraging both long-range dependencies and inter-instance connections. However, transforming the high dimensional IoT attack datasets into a graph structured dataset poses challenges, such as large graph structures leading computational overhead. To mitigate this, this paper proposes a framework that first reduces dimensionality of the NetFlow-based IoT attack dataset before transforming it into a graph dataset. We evaluate three dimension reduction techniques--Variational Autoencoder (VAE-encoder), classical autoencoder (AE-encoder), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA)--and compare their effects on a Graph Attention neural network (GAT) model for botnet attack detection
title Graph Attention Neural Network for Botnet Detection: Evaluating Autoencoder, VAE and PCA-Based Dimension Reduction
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17357