Abstract
Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) rely heavily on effective feature selection (FS) for enhanced efficacy. This study proposes a novel approach called Genetic Sacrificial Whale Optimization (GSWO) to address the limitations of conventional methods. GSWO combines a genetic algorithm (GA) and whale optimization algorithms (WOA) modified by applying a new three-population division strategy with a proposed conditional inherited choice (CIC) to overcome premature convergence in WOA. The proposed approach achieves a balance between exploration and exploitation and enhances global search abilities. Additionally, the CatBoost model is employed for classification, effectively handling categorical data with complex patterns. A new technique for fine-tuning CatBoost's hyperparameters is introduced, using effective quantization and the GSWO strategy. Extensive experimentation on various datasets demonstrates the superiority of GSWO-CatBoost, achieving higher accuracy rates on the WSN-DS, WSNBFSF, NSL-KDD, and CICIDS2017 datasets than the existing approaches. The comprehensive evaluations highlight the real-time applicability and accuracy of the proposed method across diverse data sources, including specialized WSN datasets and established benchmarks. Specifically, our GSWO-CatBoost method has an inference time nearly 100 times faster than deep learning methods while achieving high accuracy rates of 99.65%, 99.99%, 99.76%, and 99.74% for WSN-DS, WSNBFSF, NSL-KDD, and CICIDS2017, respectively.