M 3 NID: an intrusion detection system based on the dual-mode spatio-temporal feature fusion method
XueRong Yang, Ying Cui, Huige Li · PeerJ Computer Science · 2025
The rapid adoption of cloud computing and big data has led to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks that exploit weaknesses in conventional network defenses. Although machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) have made considerable progress, they still suffer from two major limitations: ineffective feature representation across multiple attack scales and inadequate modeling of temporal attack behavior. These issues result in limited detection accuracy and high false positive rates. To address these shortcomings, we propose the Multi-Scale Multi-Head Multi-Stage Network Intrusion Detection System (M 3 NID) that stacks three novel modules in a hierarchical pipeline: Parallel Multi-Scale Convolution (PMSC), Bidirectional Temporal Attention (BTA), and a packet-level Transformer. The PMSC module incorporates dynamic gating to capture spatial features across multiple granularities; the BTA module employs residual-enhanced Long Short Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) to model time-sensitive attack patterns, and the Transformer component is utilized to capture long-range contextual dependencies among network events. Experimental results demonstrate that M 3 NID significantly outperforms existing schemes across three benchmark datasets: NSL-KDD (99.69% accuracy, 99.71% detection rate, 0.32% FPR, 99.73% F1), UNSW-NB15 (86.1% accuracy, 96.88% detection rate, 4.25% FPR, 96.94% F1), and CIC-DDoS2019 (86.92% accuracy, 84.06% detection rate, 0.30% FPR, 83.91% F1), which show notable gains in accuracy and reduction in false alarms compared to state-of-the-art methods.