Effective Feature Selection for 5G IM Applications Traffic Classification

Recently, machine learning (ML) algorithms have widely been applied in Internet traffic classification. However, due to the inappropriate features selection, ML-based classifiers are prone to misclassify Internet flows as that traffic occupies majority of traffic flows. To address this problem, a novel feature selection metric named weighted mutual information (WMI) is proposed. We develop a hybrid feature selection algorithm named WMI_ACC, which filters most of the features with WMI metric. It further uses a wrapper method to select features for ML classifiers with accuracy (ACC) metric. We evaluate our approach using five ML classifiers on the two different network environment traces captured. Furthermore, we also apply Wilcoxon pairwise statistical test on the results of our proposed algorithm to find out the robust features from the selected set of features. Experimental results show that our algorithm gives promising results in terms of classification accuracy, recall, and precision. Our proposed algorithm can achieve 99% flow accuracy results, which is very promising.