Tabular-to-Image Transformations for the Classification of Anonymous Network Traffic Using Deep Residual Networks

With the meteoric rise in anonymous network traffic data, there is a considerable need for effective automation in traffic identification tasks. Though many shallow and deep machine learning network traffic classification solutions have been proposed, they often rely on tabular data, making them unable to detect complex spatial relationships. However, recent advancements in computer processing power have increased the viability of transforming tabular data into images for training deep convolutional neural networks, transforming structured data problems into spatial ones. To identify the most effective methods for representing tabular anonymous network traffic data as images, we compared five deep learning classifiers trained on data from different tabular-to-image algorithms–Image Generator for Tabular Data (IGTD), DeepInsight, vector-of-feature wrapping (normalized and non-normalized), and our newly introduced Binary Image Encoding (BIE) technique in the classification of eight network application types. Furthermore, we examine whether deep residual models trained on tabular-to-image data can outperform the top-performing shallow learner, XGBoost, at classifying anonymous network traffic. We found that ResNet-50, a pre-trained instance of deep residual network, trained on image datasets using IGTD and the novel Binary Image Encoding outperformed XGBoost trained on tabular data. Our ResNet-50 models trained using IGTD and BIE achieved F1-scores of 96.0% and 98.49% respectively, improving on the baseline of 95.1% achieved by XGBoost.