International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014

A Network Intrusions Detection System based on a Quantum Bio
Inspired Algorithm
Omar S. Soliman1, Aliaa Rassem2
1,2 Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University

Abstract: Network intrusion detection systems
(NIDSs) have a role of identifying malicious activities
by monitoring the behavior of networks. Due to the
currently high volume of networks trafic in addition
to the increased number of attacks and their dynamic
properties, NIDSs have the challenge of improving
their classification performance. Bio-Inspired
Optimization Algorithms (BIOs) are used to
automatically extract the the discrimination rules of
normal or abnormal behavior to improve the
classification accuracy and the detection ability of
NIDS. A quantum vaccined immune clonal algorithm
with the estimation of distribution algorithm
(QVICA-with EDA) is proposed in this paper to build
a new NIDS. The proposed algorithm is used as
classification algorithm of the new NIDS where it is
trained and tested using the KDD data set. Also, the
new NIDS is compared with another detection system
based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). Results
shows the ability of the proposed algorithm of
achieving high intrusions classification accuracy
where the highest obtained accuracy is 94.8 %.

Keywords: Estimation of Distribution Algorithm
(EDA), Network Intrusions Detection System (NIDS),
Quantum Vaccined Immune Clonal Algorithm
(QVICA).
,

1. Introduction
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are the systems
responsible of identifying malicious activities by
monitoring the behavior of users or networks. They
detect the abnormal behavior or unwanted traffic and
take the appropriate response against it [27]. There
are two types of intrusion detection approaches which
are the misuse and anomaly detection approaches.
Misuse detection uses known patterns, signatures, of
unauthorized behavior to detect intrusions. It is quite
strong to detect known intrusions but it has low
degree of accuracy in detecting unknown intrusions
since it relies on signatures extracted by human
experts. Anomaly detection establishes a baseline of
normal usage patterns and if it finds something that
widely deviates from the baseline, the deviation is
agged as a possible intrusion. Although it is powerful
to identify new types of intrusion as deviations from
normal usage, a potential drawback is the high false

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alarm rate, previously unseen system behaviors may
be recognized as anomalies, and hence flagged as
potential intrusions [15]. IDSs can also be
categorized to host-based and network-based
depending on the audit data which they will analyze.
Host based systems examine data of users like what
files were accessed and what applications were
executed. Network-based IDS (NIDS) examines data
as packets of information exchange through the
networks.
The goal of NIDSs is to quickly and accurately
recognize and distinguish the normal and abnormal
network connections. They seek to have a high
intrusions detection rate and a low false alarms,
detecting normal connections as intrusions, to ensure
high classification accuracy. There are some
challenges facing these systems which make it
difficult to achieve such a goal and keep security of
networks. These challenges are the current high
volume of networks traffic in addition to the
increased number of attacks (intrusions) and their
complex and dynamic properties. Artificial
intelligence and machine learning were used to build
different NIDSs but they have shown limitations to
achieving high detection accuracy and fast processing
times when confronted with these challenges.
Computational Intelligence techniques, BIOs, known
for their ability to adapt and to exhibit fault tolerance,
high computational speed and resilience against noisy
information, compensate for the limitations of these
two approaches [30].
Many BIOs have been applied as classification
techniques for NIDSs, like the artificial immune
system (AIS), Artifical Neural Networks (ANNs),
particle swarm optimization (PSO) and many others.
They were able to easily and automatically extract
the the discrimination rules of normal or abnormal
behavior from the large networks logs [7]. Also the
Quantum Inspired Evolutionary Algorithms (QIEAs)
have been used to build NIDSs. QIEAs are some sort
of hybrid algorithms appeared in 1990s. They
hybridize the classical BIOs with quantum computing
(QC) paradigm to improve the performance of these
algorithms especially in complex large problems with
high dimensions. The algorithms in this new field
proved have been used in many applications
including networks security where they proved their

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
effectiveness over the traditional BIOs. New hybrid
algorithms can be introduced to enhance the
performance of QIEAs and increase the quality of
obtained solutions.
The aim of this paper is to build a NIDS based on a
new proposed BIO named Quantum Vaccined
Immune Clonal Algorithm with Estimation of
Distribution Algorithm (QVICA-with EDA). This
algorithm introduces the vaccine operator and the
EDA sampling to be added to the classical Quantum
Inspired Immune Clonal Algorithm (QICA). The
algorithm is used to build a better NIDS with a higher
intrusions classification accuracy. It is trained and
tested using the audit data of the benchmark KDD
dataset and is compared with another NIDS based on
Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Results show
the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the
PSO. The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 introduces related works in the field of IDS
classification algorithms and a background of
necessary terms. Section 3 introduces the proposed
algorithm where experimental results and discussion
are in section 4. The last section is devoted to
conclusions and further works.

2. Related Works and Background
EAs and QIEAs have been used in past few years in
many researches for intrusions classification to
increase the detection accuracy of IDS. A sample of
these researches is shown in this section. The
immune clonal algorithm was used in many
networking applications like intrusion detection for
securing networks and the spam detection. A
Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) based
on the immunological approach was proposed where
an adaptive sampling algorithm was applied during
the data collection stage. This algorithm was used
according to the dynamic characters of detection data
where it was able to improve the data-processing
capabilities and the fault tolerance of the system [8].
A collaborative intrusion detection system was
proposed to detect denial of service attacks by using
the artificial immune system due to its distributional,
collaborative, robust and adaptive capabilities. This
system was applied for peer to peer networks where it
was able to increase the precision of attack discovery
and decreases false positive rate [21]. Also, An IDS
based on immune algorithm (IA) and support vector
machine (SVM) was introduced . In this method,
immune algorithm is used to preprocess the network
data, SVM is adopted to classify the optimization
data, and recognize intruders. Results showed that the
feasibility and efficiency of the system [5].

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A hybrid intrusion detection system based on rough
set (RS )for feature selection and simplified swarm
optimization for intrusion data classification was
applied. RS is proposed to select the most relevant
features and the PSO with a new weighted local
search( WLS) strategy was used for classfication.
The WLS is added to discover the better solution
from the neighborhood of the current solution
produced by PSO. The testing results showed that the
proposed hybrid system can achieve higher
classification accuracy [6]. Particle Swarm
Optimization and its variants were combined with
various Machine Learning techniques. They were
used for Anomaly Detection in Network Intrusion
Detection System to enhance the performance of
system [22]. An improved negative selection
algorithm that integrates a novel further training
strategy to reduce self-samples, to reduce
computational cost in testing stage, was developed.
The algorithm was able to get the highest detection
rate and the lowest false alarm rate in most cases [9].
The Support Vector Machine (SVM) was introduced
as a classifier for an IDS where a wrapper based
feature selection approach using Bees algorithm (BA)
as a search strategy for subset generation. The result
shows that these combined algorithms has yielded
better quality IDS [2]. Also, An improved
incremental SVM algorithm (ISVM) combined with
a kernel function U-RBF was proposed and applied
into network intrusion detection. The simulation
results showed that the improved kernel function URBF has played some role in saving training time and
test time [33]. An anomaly based network IDS using
GA approach was adopted where the proposed IDS
used an adaptive GA for both learning and detection.
The proposed method was efficient with respect to
good detection rate with low false positives in
addition to the lower execution time [24]. An IDS
based on GA was proposed where GA uses evolution
theory to information evolution in order to filter the
trafic data and so reduce the complexity. It was
implemented on KDD99 benchmark dataset and
obtained reasonable detection rate [12].
A QIEA using eigenvectors and niching strategy was
used to optimize the database of the signature based
detection system, an ID system type that is known
with its poor detection performance [29], and the
algorithm was able to improve the ID's ability in
detecting the unknown attacks [34]. A QIEA was also
used for optimizing the features selection and kernel
parameters of the support vector machine used for
anomaly detection [31]. The QGA was also used to
optimize the clustering methodology and get the
optimal number of clusters to be used for classifying
the data collected by the IDS [32]. A quantum neural
network (NN) was applied for intrusion application to

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
overcome the weakness of the back propagation NN
which may fall into local minimum [4]. The quantum
particle swarm optimization (QPSO) was used as a
trainer for NN and SVM to get better IDS
performance. It was applied to train the wavelet NN
to improve the detection rate for anomalies and
reduce the false detection alarms in the network
anomaly detection [17]. It was also applied with the
Gradient Descent (GD) method to train the Radial
Basis Function NN for network anomaly detection
[18]. It was used with SVM for network Intrusion
feature selection and detection where each particle
was a selected subset of features and its fitness was
defined as the correct classification percentage by
SVM [11]. It was used also for solving the linear
system of equations of the least square SVM (LSSVM )to overcome the LS-SVM weakness and
guarantee the sparsity and robustness of the solutions
[29].
2.1. Quantum
Algorithm

Inspired

Immune

Clonal

The artificial immune system algorithms (AIS) are a
set of EAs inspiring their procedure from the human
immune system functionality. AIS include many
different algorithms where the two major used
algorithms are the negative selection algorithm and
the immune clonal algorithm (ICA). ICA is inspired
from the human immune systems clonal selection
process over the B cells where the evolution process
of the antibodies is a repeated cycle of matching,
cloning, mutating and replacing. The best B cells are
allowed through this process to survive which
increases the attacking performance against the
unknown antigens. Vaccination is another
immunological concept that ICA applies through the
vaccine operator. This operator is used to introduce
some degree of diversity between solutions and
increase their fitness values by using artificial
Vaccines.
Quantum inspired evolutionary algorithms (QIEAs)
were introduced in the 1990s, they integrate the
quantum computing concepts with evolutionary
process of EAs. They are able to improve the quality
of solutions and enhance the algorithms performance
as EAs suffer from bad performance in high
dimensional problems. EAs, including the ICA, have
to do numerous evolutionary operations and fitness
evaluations in large problems which limit them from
performing effectively. The hybridization between
quantum properties and traditional ICA process
enhanced its performance in complex problems.
QICA combined quantum computing principles, like
quantum bits, quantum superposition property and
quantum observation process, with immune clonal

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selection theory. These concepts are described below
in details where the quantum bit representation for
antibodies and vaccines in QICA has the advantage
of representing a linear superposition of states
(classical solutions) in search space probabilistically.
Quantum representation can guarantee less
population size as a few number of antibodies and
vaccines can represent a large set of solutions
through the space [23]. The quantum observation
process plays a great role in projecting the multi state
quantum antibodies into one of its basic states to help
in the individuals evaluation.
-Quantum Bit: By using quantum bit (q-bit)
representation, a small population of antibodies can
be created where it represents a larger set of
antibodies due to the quantum superpostiion property.
The quantum antibody population is initialized with n
quantum antibodies using m q-bits for each one.
Unlike the classical bit, the q-bit does not represent
only the value 0 or 1 but a superposition of the two.
Its state can be given by:

= | > + | >

( )

Where α and β are complex numbers and α2 is the
probability to have value 0 and β2 is the probability
of having value 1 and α2 + β2 = 1.
- Observation Process: The quantum represented
individuals are converted into binary representation
by iterating over each q-bit in the individual and
change it to a binary bit. The process is described in
algorithm 1
Algorithm 1 Observation Process
1: for i = 1 to m do
2: Generate a random number r between 0 and 1
3:
≤
ℎ
4:
set the binary bit of i as 0
5: else
6: set the binary bit as 1
7: end if
8: end for
2.2. Estimation of Distribution Algorithm
The most of evolutionary algorithms (EA) use
sampling during their evolution process for
generating new solutions. Some of these algorithms
use it implicitly, like Genetic Algorithm (GA), as
new individuals are sampled through the genetic
operators of the cross over and mutation of the
parents. Other algorithms apply an explicit sampling
procedure through using probabilistic models
representing the solutions characteristics. These

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
algorithms are called the iterated density estimation
evolutionary algorithms (IDEAs) where an iterated
process of probabilistic model estimation takes place
to sample new individuals [10], [16]. Estimation of
Distribution Algorithms (EDAs), an example of the
IDEA, are population based algorithms with a
theoretical foundation on probability theory. They
can extract the global statistical information about the
search space from the search so far and builds a
probability model of promising solutions [25]. Unlike
GAs, the new individuals in the next population are
generated without crossover or mutation operators.
They are randomly reproduced by a probability
distribution estimated from the selected individuals in
the previous generation [16].
EDA has some advantages, over other traditional
EAs, where it is able to capture the interrelations and
inter dependencies between the problem variables
through the estimation of their joint density function.
EDA doesn't have the problem of finding the
appropriate values of many parameters as it only
relies on the probability estimation with no other
additional parameters. The general EDA procedure is
shown in Algorithm 2.
Algorithm 2 Estimation of Distribution Algorithm
1: Initialize the initial population.
2: while termination condition is not satisfied do
3: Select a certain number of excellent individuals.
4:
Construct probabilistic model by analyzing
information of the selected individuals.
5:
Create new population by sampling new
individuals from the constructed probabilistic model.
6: end while
The EDA relies on the construction and maintenance
of a probability model that generates satisfactory
solutions for the problem solved. An estimated
probabilistic model, to capture the joint probabilities
between variables, is constructed from selecting the
current best solutions and then it is simulated for
producing samples to guide the search process and
update the induced model. Estimating the joint
probability distribution associated with the data
constitutes the bottleneck of EDA. Based on the
complexity of the model used, EDAs are classified
into different categories, without interdependencies,
pair wise dependencies and multiply dependencies
algorithms as below [10] ,
-Without Interdependencies EDAs: These models
are used when there is no dependency assumed
between the variables of the problem. The joint
probability distribution is factorized to n independent
univariate probability distributions p(xi). Univariate
Marginal Distribution Algorithm (UMDA), an

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example for this category, estimates the p(xi) from
the relative marginal frequencies of the Xi of the
selected data. Other examples of EDAs under this
category are the Population Based Incremental
Learning (PBIL) and compact genetic algorithm
(cGA) [14]. UMDA, as an example, estimates the
( ) from the relative marginal frequencies of the
of the selected data.

( )=

( )

( , , ∈) =

( ,

,∈ )

( )

-Pair-wise Dependencies EDAs: This type of EDAs
assumes dependency between pairs of the variables.
The joint probability distribution of the variables is
factorized as the product of a univariate density
function and (n - 1) pair wise conditional density
functions given a permutation = ( , … , ) between
variables. Examples are the Bivariate Marginal
Distribution Algorithm (BMDA), Mutual Information
Maximization for Input Clustering (MIMIC) and
Combining Optimizers with Mutual Information
Trees (COMIT) algorithms. MIMIC, as an example,
searches for the best permutation ∗ , of the n
variables, that will minimize the ( ), KullbackLeibler divergence function between the ( ) and
p(x) [10].

( )= (

). (

)… (

|

|

) ( )

-Multiple Interdependencies EDAs: Dependencies
are assumed between multiple variables where
probabilistic graphical models based on either
directed or undirected graphs are widely used.
Structural and parametric learning are done to learn
the topology of the networks and estimate the
conditional probabilities. Bayesian network algorithm
(BOA), the Markov network EDA and factorized
Distribution Algorithm (FDA) are some examples.
(For more details, see [14] and [28]).

( )=

( |

( )=
3.

( ,

( ),
,

)=
)

Proposed
Network
Detection System

( )
( )
Intrusions

This work builds a NIDS using a new classification
algorithm to improve the detection performance. It

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
proposes a new BIO named Quantum Vaccined
Immune Clonal Algorithm with Estimation of
Distribution Algorithm (QVICAwith EDA). It is
based on the quantum computing concepts, immune
clonal selection principles and the vaccine operator
with EDA sampling. The NIDS is then compared
with another system base on PSO [6].A general
schema of the proposed NIDS is shown in figure 1.
Figure 1 shows that the system has three main stages.
First stage is about data preprocessing; the second is
the training phase of the proposed classification
algorithm and the last one is the testing phase where
a detailed description is shown below.

Fig 1: The new NIDS based on the proposed algorithm
(the QVICA-with EDA)

3.1. Data Preprocessing Phase
This phase is concerned with the preprocessing of
data represented in the dataset records (network
connections). The data are divided into two sets, the
training set and the test set. There is a class assigned
to each record in the training set, to indicate either it
is a normal connection or an attack one, where test
records are without class labels. Each record does not
have the total 41 features of the KDD, instead it has
only six selected features. These six features are
those selected and used in the PSO work which are
the Service, src_bytes, dst_bytes, Rerror_rate,
dst_host_srv_count and dst_host_diff _srv_rate.
The proposed NIDS uses the same selected features
for fair comparisons where the symbolic conversion
of the symbolic features are done followed by Equal
frequency discretization (EFD) for the continuous
features. The processed data is the two outputs of this
phase where the processed training set, called
training Antigens (AGs), is used as an input for the
training phase. The processed testing set, called test
Antigens, is used as the input for the last phase of
testing.

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3.2. Training Phase
In this phase, the QVICA-V with EDA is trained
using the training AGs to learn how to classify the
data into normal and intrusions. as mentioned before,
the algorithm integrates the quantum computing, for
representation, and immune clonal selection
principles with the vaccine operator for diversifying
solutions. The algorithm also utilizes the EDA
probabilistic models and sampling to improve the
fitness of antibodies (solutions), increase the degree
of diversity and shorten the execution time of the
whole algorithm. The main steps of the proposed
algorithm are described in Algorithm 3 [23]. As
shown in algorithm 3, the algorithm starts by
initializing both the quantum antibody population
Q(t) and the quantum vaccine population V (t)
followed by cloning and mutataing antibodies to be
then decoded for evaluation. Additional steps to the
simple QICA, like vaccine decoding and sampling
will be described in details. The quantum vaccine
population V (t) is initialized in the same way
with n quantum vaccines where n is the number of
grids that the decision space is divided to and
= ( ∗ ∗ … ) with d which is the number of
dimensions [23].
- Initialization: Quantum antibodies and vaccines
populations are created where V (t) is initialized with
n quantum vaccines where n is the number of grids
that the decision space is divided to and = ( ∗
∗ … ) with d which is the number of
dimensions. Quantum antibodies Q(t) are cloned and
mutated to get Q’(t) using the clonal operator with
C as number of clones that will produce the Q’(t)
where , C and Q’(t) are as follows,

(

)=[ (

), (

), … (

( )

=
′( ) = [

)] ( )

,

,

,…,

] ( )

Algorithm 3 The proposed Algorithm (QICA-V with
EDA)
1: Initialize the quantum antibody and vaccine
populations, Q(t) and V(t).
2: Initialize t=1 as first iteration
3: while termination condition is not satisfied do
4: Apply the clonal and quantum mutation
operators over the Q(t) to get Q’(t)
5: Produce B’(t) by observing Q’(t).
6: Decode V (t) to get .
7: Divide into two subpopulations, and

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
8: Select the farthest vaccines from as the
current
.
9: Estimate probability distribution of the
.
10: Sample the distribution to get the new
11: Apply the genetic operators over the
to get
the new
12: Build the new by merging the new and
new
13: Apply vaccination over B(t) using the new to
get BV (t).
14: Apply clonal selection operator over BV (t) to
get Q(t + 1).
15: end while
-Vaccine Decoding: Binary vaccines are converted
into decimal representation between 0 and 2m - 1 to
get V1 set. These decimal vaccines have to be
injected into the decision space so that they are
decoded to be within the decision space domain and
get V2 set using the following formula,

=

+
= ,..,

∗

−
(

)

Where
is the coordinate of the grid (i) and width j
is the width of dimension (j) and j = 1,2,…, d. The
width can be computed using the maximum and
minimum values of each dimension.
-Vaccine Selection and vaccination: Hamming
distance is used to compute the distance between the
vaccines and antibodies to evaluate the farthest
vaccines. The Hamming distance function is
performed as in algorithm 4.
Vaccines with higher hamming distances from all
antibodies are selected (to enhance the exploration)
into Vbest set. Vaccines in this set are used to apply
the injection process over the mutated AB clones
where the injection in our proposed algorithm is done
in the real representation.
Algorithm 4 Hamming distnace Function
1: for each bit a in vaccinei and bit b in antibodyj do
2: if a == b then
3:
mismatchcounter = 0
4: else
5:
mismatchcounter = 1
6: end if
7: end for
8: Hamming distance (i,j) = ∑ Mismatchcounter
-Vaccine Sampling: EDA estimates the probability
distribution of the next iterations best vaccines from
the current Vbest. It uses the mean and standard

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deviation (sd), as shown below where b is the length
of Vbest, of the vaccines in Vbest to construct its
model.

=
=

∑
∑[

(
− ]

)
(

)

-Clonal selection: The best antibodies from the
vaccined antibodies population and selected to form
Q(t+1) and converted again into quantum
representation to proceed to a new iteration.
3.3. Testing Phase
In this phase, the QVICA-with EDA is tested to
evaluate the training process. It is tested using the test
antigens, with no class label, produced by the first
phase. The final trained antibodies, from the training
phase, are matched with the test antigens. Each test
antigen is matched with the whole set of these
antibodies to be assigned to a class. The higher the
number of matched ABs with the antigen, the more
probability that this antigen follows their class. At the
end of the phase, the class labels of all the test
antigens are detected either as normal or attack.

4. Experiments and Results
The proposed algorithm, QVICA- with EDA, is
implemented as the classification algorithm for a
NIDS and compared with another classification
algorithm based on PSO [6]. The experiments were
implemented over the The KDD-Cup 99 (Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining Tools Conference) , a
benchmark dataset for the netwrok intrusion
detection systems [1]. Each record in the KDD
represents a TCP/IP connection that is composed of
41 features that are both qualitative and quantitative
in nature . There are 39 types of distinct attacks in
KDD, grouped into four classes of attack and one
class of non attack (normal connections). The main
attack types are Denial of Service (DoS),
Probe,Remote-to-Local (R2L) and User-to-Root
(U2R) where detailed description of each and its sub
types is below [19], [13] and [3].
-Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: where an attacker
makes some computing or memory resource too busy
or too full to handle legitimate requests, thus denying
legitimate users access to a machine. Sub attacks of
DoS
are,
Back,Land,neptune,Pod,Smurf
and
teardrop.
-Probe attacks: where an attacker scans a network to
gather information or find known vulnerabilities.

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
Probe's sub attacks are Satan,ipsweep,Nmap and
portsweep.
-Remote-to-Local (R2L) attacks: where an attacker
sends packets to a machine over a network, then
exploits machines vulnerability to illegally gain local
access as a user. Sub attacks of R2L that can be
found in the sets' records are guess-passwd,ftpwrite,Imap, Phf,multihop,warezmaster, warezclient
and spy.
-User-to-Root (U2R) attacks: where an attacker
starts out with access to a normal user account on the
system and is able to exploit vulnerability to gain root
access to the system. U2R sub attacks are Bufieroverow,loadmodule,perl and rootkit .
Table 1: ACCURACY FOR DIFFERENT EXPERIMENTS USING
QVICA-WITH EDA

Pop Size
10
20
30
40
50

QVICA-with EDA
Iterations
10
20
30

40

89.0
89.1
86.6
93.8
89.3

89.9
89.1
93.4
94.5
94.2

86.5
87.1
90.8
93.2
93.4

87.7
92.5
93.1
94.7
94.8

The same parameters settings of the PSO-WLS
algorithm are used for our algorithm for fair
comparison. A set of 4000 records is selected from
the KDD based on the selected features of the PSOWLS work to evaluate the performance of the
QVICA- with EDA. The 10-fold cross validation
method is applied where the data are distributed as 10
for testing and the remaining 90 for training.
Table 2: ACCURACY FOR DIFFERENT EXPERIMENTS USING
PSO-WLS

the number of iterations is set to 10,20,30 and 40
with total of 20 independent
runs. The best values of accuracy through different
experiments are captured and compared with the
results of the PSO-WLS algorithm as in tables 1 and
2 where accuracy is as in equation 13 [6],

=

+

+
+

+

(

)

The tables show that our algorithm outperforms the
PSO-WLS algorithm in some experiments where
higher accuracy values are obtained. The highest
accuracy value was achieved with 50 antibodies and
30 iterations. A sample of the results are also
visualized in figures 2, 3 and 4 for more clarification.
Using 40 and 50 as the values of the population size,
the proposed algorithm is better than the PSO-WLS
classification in all different experiments.

Fig 2:Classification Accuracy at differnt iterations with
population size of 30

Fig 3: Classification Accuracy at differnt iterations with
population size of 40

PSO-WLS
Iterations
10
20

30
40
Pop Size
10
85.6
87.0
90.4
91.8
20
87.7
89.0
90.6
93.2
30
88.6
89.5
93.5
93.5
40
88.6
90.0
93.5
93.6
50
88.6
91.5
93.5
93.6
Classification accuracy is the evaluation measure
used in this work. The antibodies population size, are
set to different values of 10,20,30,40 and 50 where

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Fig 4: Classification Accuracy at differnt iterations with
population size of 50

For more investigation, the accuracy of each fold in
one of the best experiments is recorded in table 3 and
compared with the folds results of the PSO-WLS

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 10 Number 8 - Apr 2014
algorithm where higher values are obtained by our
algorithm. The detailed accuracy values of the 20
runs of the best experiment is in table 4 and are
compared with the best experiment of the other
algorithm. The proposed algorithm is able to get
higher classification accuracy than the best value of
the PSO based algorithm using the same parameters.
Table 3: ACCURACY OF THE 10 FOLD CROSS VALIDATION
OF ONE OF THE BEST RUNS

Fold

Accuracy Value
QVICA-with
EDA
0.9425
0.9776
0.9626
0.8803
0.9476
0.9476
0.9027
0.9651
0.9651
0.9451

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

PSO-WLS
0.943
0.925
0.925
0.938
0.933
0.925
0.943
0.945
0.945
0.933

Table 4: ACCURACY OF THE TWO ALGORITHMS OVER 20
RUNS (FOR THE BEST EXPERIMENT)

Run

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Mean

Accuracy Value
QVICA-with
EDA
94.1
92.9
93.6
94.7
94.2
92.6
88.0
90.2
91.2
94.0
92.1
92.3
93.9
91.8
93.3
93.8
92.0
91.1
94.8
89.6
94.81

ISSN: 2231-5381

PSO-WLS
93.4
93.5
93.3
93.5
93.2
93.3
93.2
93.4
93.5
93.4
92.5
93.3
93.2
93.4
93.3
93.0
93.4
93.5
93.0
93.4
93.3

5. Conclusions
A quantum vaccined immune clonal algorithm with
the estimation of distribution algorithm (QVICA-with
EDA) was proposed in this paper as a classification
algorithm for the NIDS. It was compared with
another classification algorithm based on particle
swarm optimization (PSO) on the KDD data set.
Classification accuracy values obtained at the
different experiments showed the ability of the
algorithm of achieving high classification accuracy. It
outperforms the other algorithm in many experiments
which proved its effectiveness. More experiments
with different parameters settings will be done in
future work to ensure that the algorithm is powerful
for intrusion detection.

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