Unified Anomaly Detection in IoT and Cyber-Physical Networks Using Evo-Transformer-LSTM: Validation on Four CIC Benchmarks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) within critical infrastructure sectors has significantly expanded the attack surface for advanced and stealthy cyber threats. Since these systems increasingly rely on real-time data exchange and autonomous control, developing intelligent, scalable, and adaptive anomaly detection mechanisms has become a pressing requirement. This paper proposes a novel hybrid framework, evolutionary-transformer-long short-term memory (Evo-Transformer-LSTM), that integrates the temporal modeling capability of LSTM networks, the global attention mechanism of Transformer encoders, and the optimization power of the improved chimp optimization algorithm (IChOA) for hyper-parameter tuning. In the proposed architecture, the Transformer encoder extracts high-level contextual patterns from traffic sequences, while the LSTM component captures local temporal dependencies. The framework is rigorously evaluated on four benchmark datasets from the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC): CIC-IDS-2017, CSE-CIC-IDS-2018, CIC IoT-DIAD (2024), and CICIoV (2024). Comparative experiments are conducted against several state-of-the-art baselines, including transformer, LSTM, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), convolutional neural network (CNN), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and random forest (RF) classifiers. Results show that the proposed Evo-Transformer-LSTM achieves up to 98.25% accuracy, an F1-score of 97.91%, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 99.36% on CIC-IDS 2017, while maintaining above 96% accuracy and 98% AUC even on the more challenging CICIoV 2024 dataset, consistently surpassing all baseline models. In addition, statistical significance tests confirm the superiority of the proposed approach. In conclusion, Evo-Transformer-LSTM offers a unified, scalable, and robust solution for anomaly detection in modern IoT and CPS infrastructures, with potential for real-world deployment in security-sensitive domains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".