Xueliang Fu

In the highly interconnected digital ecosystem, cyberspace has become the main battlefield for complex attacks such as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). The complexity and concealment of APT attacks are increasing, posing unprecedented challenges to network security. Current APT detection methods largely depend on general datasets, making it challenging to capture the stages and complexity of APT attacks. Moreover, existing detection methods often suffer from suboptimal accuracy, high false alarm rates, and a lack of real-time capabilities. In this paper, we introduce LDR-RFECV, a novel feature selection (FS) algorithm that uses LightGBM, Decision Trees (DTs), and Random Forest (RF) as integrated feature evaluators instead of single evaluators in recursive feature elimination algorithms. This approach helps select the optimal feature subset, thereby significantly enhancing detection efficiency. In addition, a novel optimization algorithm called LWHO was proposed, which integrates the Levy flight mechanism with the Wild Horse Optimizer (WHO) to optimize the hyperparameters of the LightGBM model, ultimately enhancing performance in APT attack detection. More importantly, this optimization strategy significantly boosts the detection rate during the lateral movement phase of APT attacks, a pivotal stage where attackers infiltrate key resources. Timely identification is essential for disrupting the attack chain and achieving precise defense. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 97.31% and 98.32% accuracy on two typical APT attack datasets, DAPT2020 and Unraveled, respectively, which is 2.86% and 4.02% higher than the current research methods, respectively.

Sugarcane is the primary crop in the global sugar industry, yet it remains highly susceptible to a wide range of diseases that significantly impact its yield and quality. An effective solution is required to address the issues caused by the manual identification of plant diseases, which is time-consuming and has low detection accuracy. This paper proposes the development of a robust Deep Ensemble Convolutional Neural Network (DECNN) model for the accurate detection of sugarcane leaf diseases. Initially, several transfer learning (TL) models, including EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121, NASNetMobile, and EfficientNetV2B0, were enhanced through the addition of specific layers. A comparative analysis was then conducted on the enlarged dataset of sugarcane leaf diseases, which was divided into six categories and 4800 images. The application of data augmentation, along with the addition of dense layers, batch normalization layers, and dropout layers, led to improved detection accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores for each model. Among the five enhanced transfer learning models, the modified EfficientNetB0 model demonstrated the highest detection accuracy, ranging from 97.08% to 98.54%. In conclusion, the DECNN model was developed by integrating the modified EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121 models using a distinctive performance-based custom-weighted ensemble method, with weight optimization carried out using the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) technique. This resulted in a model that achieved a detection accuracy of 99.17%, which outperformed the individual performance of the modified EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121 models in detecting sugarcane leaf diseases.

In precision feeding, non-contact and pressure-free monitoring of sheep feeding behavior is crucial for health monitoring and optimizing production management. The experimental conditions and real-world environments differ when using acoustic sensors to identify sheep feeding behaviors, leading to discrepancies and consequently posing challenges for achieving high-accuracy classification in complex production environments. This study enhances the classification performance by integrating the deep spectrogram features and acoustic characteristics associated with feeding behavior. We conducted the task of collecting sound data in actual production environments, considering noise and complex surroundings. The method included evaluating and filtering the optimal acoustic features, utilizing a customized convolutional neural network (SheepVGG-Lite) to extract Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms and Constant Q Transform (CQT) spectrograms’ deep features, employing cross-spectrogram feature fusion and assessing classification performance through a support vector machine (SVM). Results indicate that the fusion of cross-spectral features significantly improved classification performance, achieving a classification accuracy of 96.47%. These findings highlight the value of integrating acoustic features with spectrogram deep features for accurately recognizing sheep feeding behavior.

Sugarcane is the primary crop in the global sugar industry, yet it remains highly susceptible to a wide range of diseases that significantly impact its yield and quality. An effective solution is required to solve the issues given by manual identification of plant diseases, which is time-consuming and wasteful, as well as low detection accuracy. This paper proposes the development of a robust deep ensemble convolutional neural network (DECNN) model for the accurate detection of sugarcane leaf diseases. Initially, several transfer learning (TL) models, including EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121, NASNetMobile, and EfficientNetV2B0, were enhanced through the addition of specific layers. A comparative study was then conducted on the improved dataset. The application of data augmentation, along with the addition of dense layers, batchnormalization layers, and dropout layers, led to improved detection accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score for each model. Among the five enhanced transfer learning models, the modified EfficientNetB0 model demonstrated the highest detection accuracy, ranging from 97.08% to 98.54%. In conclusion, the DECNN model was developed by integrating the modified EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121 models using a distinctive performance-based custom weighted ensemble method, with weight optimization carried out using the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) technique. This resulted in a model that achieved a detection accuracy of 99.17%, outperforming the individual performances of the modified EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121 models in detecting sugarcane leaf diseases.

The fast growth of the Internet has made network security problems more noticeable, so intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have become a crucial tool for maintaining network security. IDSs guarantee the normal operation of the network by tracking network traffic and spotting possible assaults, thereby safeguarding data security. However, traditional intrusion detection methods encounter several issues such as low detection efficiency and prolonged detection time when dealing with massive and high-dimensional data. Therefore, feature selection (FS) is particularly important in IDSs. By selecting the most representative features, it can not only improve the detection accuracy but also significantly reduce the computational complexity and attack detection time. This work proposes a new FS approach, BPSO-SA, that is based on the Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithms. It combines these with the Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm to optimize the LightGBM model, thereby building a new type of reflective Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack detection model. The BPSO-SA algorithm enhances the global search capability of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) using the SA mechanism and effectively screens out the optimal feature subset; the GWO algorithm optimizes the hyperparameters of LightGBM by simulating the group hunting behavior of gray wolves to enhance the detection performance of the model. While showing great resilience and generalizing power, the experimental results show that the proposed reflective DDoS attack detection model surpasses conventional methods in terms of detection accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and prediction time.

As 5G technology becomes more widespread, the significant improvement in network speed and connection density has introduced more challenges to network security. In particular, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have become more frequent and complex in software-defined network (SDN) environments. The complexity and diversity of 5G networks result in a great deal of unnecessary features, which may introduce noise into the detection process of an intrusion detection system (IDS) and reduce the generalization ability of the model. This paper aims to improve the performance of the IDS in 5G networks, especially in terms of detection speed and accuracy. It proposes an innovative feature selection (FS) method to filter out the most representative and distinguishing features from network traffic data to improve the robustness and detection efficiency of the IDS. To confirm the suggested method’s efficacy, this paper uses four common machine learning (ML) models to evaluate the InSDN, CICIDS2017, and CICIDS2018 datasets and conducts real-time DDoS attack detection on the simulation platform. According to experimental results, the suggested FS technique may match 5G network requirements for high speed and high reliability of the IDS while also drastically cutting down on detection time and preserving or improving DDoS detection accuracy.

Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) is an important parameter in water bodies. Due to the complexity of optics in water bodies, it is difficult to accurately predict Chl-a concentrations in water bodies by current traditional methods. In this paper, using Sentinel-2 remote sensing images as the data source combined with measured data, taking Wuliangsu Lake as the study area, a new intelligent algorithm is proposed for prediction of Chl-a concentration, which uses the adaptive ant colony exhaustive optimization algorithm (A-ACEO) for feature selection and the gray wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) to optimize support vector regression (SVR) to achieve Chl-a concentration prediction. The ant colony optimization algorithm is improved to select remote sensing feature bands for Chl-a concentration by introducing relevant optimization strategies. The GWO-SVR model is built by optimizing SVR using GWO with the selected feature bands as input and comparing it with the traditional SVR model. The results show that the usage of feature bands selected by the presented A-ACEO algorithm as inputs can effectively reduce complexity and improve the prediction performance of the model, under the condition of the same model, which can provide valuable references for monitoring the Chl-a concentration in Wuliangsu Lake.

Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) is an important parameter of water bodies, but due to the complexity of optics in water bodies, it is currently difficult to accurately predict Chl-a concentration in water bodies by traditional methods. In this paper, Sentinel-2 remote sensing images is used as the data source combined with measured data, and Ulansuhai Lake is taken as the study area. An adaptive ant colony exhaustive optimization (A-ACEO) algorithm is proposed for feature selection and combined with a novel intelligent algorithm of optimizing support vector regression (SVR) by genetic algorithm (GA) for prediction of Chl-a concentration. The ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is improved to select remote sensing feature bands for Chl-a concentration by introducing relevant optimization strategies. The GA-SVR model is built by optimizing SVR using GA with the selected feature bands as input, and comparing with the traditional SVR model. The simulation results show that under the same conditions, using A-ACEO algorithm to select feature bands as inputs can effectively reduce the model complexity, and improve the model prediction performance, which provides a valuable reference for monitoring Chl-a concentration in lakes.