Dynamic Adaptive Parsing of Temporal and Cross-Variable Patterns for Network State Classification

Abstract

Effective network state classification is a primary task for ensuring network security and optimizing performance. Existing deep learning models have shown considerable progress in this area. Some methods excel at analyzing the complex temporal periodicities found in traffic data, while graph-based approaches are adept at modeling the dynamic dependencies between different variables. However, a key trade-off remains, as these methods struggle to capture both characteristics simultaneously. Models focused on temporal patterns often overlook crucial variable dependencies, whereas those centered on dependencies may fail to capture fine-grained temporal details. To address this trade-off, we introduce DAPNet, a framework based on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. DAPNet integrates three specialized networks for periodic analysis, dynamic cross-variable correlation modeling, and hybrid temporal feature extraction. A learnable gating network dynamically assigns weights to experts based on the input sample and computes a weighted fusion of their outputs. Furthermore, a hybrid regularization loss function ensures stable training and addresses the common issue of class imbalance. Extensive experiments on two large-scale network intrusion detection datasets (CICIDS2017/2018) validate DAPNet's higher accuracy for its target application. The generalizability of the architectural design is evaluated across ten public UEA benchmark datasets, positioning DAPNet as a specialized framework for network state classification.