Explainable internet traffic classification

The problem analyzed in this paper deals with the classification of Internet traffic. During the last years, this problem has experienced a new hype, as classification of Internet traffic has become essential to perform advanced network management. As a result, many different methods based on classical Machine Learning and Deep Learning have been proposed. Despite the success achieved by these techniques, existing methods are lacking because they provide a classification output that does not help practitioners with any information regarding the criteria that have been taken to the given classification or what information in the input data makes them arrive at their decisions. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we focus on an “explainable” method for traffic classification able to provide the practitioners with information about the classification output. More specifically, our proposed solution is based on a multi-objective evolutionary fuzzy classifier (MOEFC), which offers a good trade-off between accuracy and explainability of the generated classification models. The experimental results, obtained over two well-known publicly available data sets, namely, UniBS and UPC, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.