The Internet of Things (IoT) connects people, devices, and processes in multiple ways, resulting in the rapid transformation of several industries. Apart from several positive impacts, the IoT presents various challenges that must be overcome. Considering that related devices are often resource-constrained and are deployed in insecure environments, the proliferation of IoT devices causes several security concerns. Given these vulnerabilities, this paper presents criteria for identifying those features most closely related to such vulnerabilities to help enhance anomaly-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs). This study uses the RT-IoT2022 dataset, sourced from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, which was specifically developed for real-time IoT intrusion detection tasks. Feature selection is performed by combining the concepts of information gain, gain ratio, correlation-based feature selection, Pearson’s correlation analysis, and symmetric uncertainty. This approach offers new insights into the tasks of detecting and mitigating IoT-based threats by analyzing the major correlations between several features of the network and specific types of attacks, such as the relationship between ‘fwd_init_window_size’ and SYN flood attacks. The proposed IDS framework is an accurate framework that can be integrated with real-time applications and provides a robust solution to IoT security threats. These selected features can be applied to machine learning and deep learning classifiers to further enhance detection capabilities in IoT environments.

The size of data transmitted through various communication systems has recently increased due to technological advancements in the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). IoT communications rely on intrusion detection systems (IDS) to ensure secure and reliable data transmission, as traditional security mechanisms, such as firewalls and encryption, remain susceptible to attacks. An effective IDS is crucial as evolving threats continue to expose new security vulnerabilities. This study proposes an integrated approach combining feature selection methods and principal component analysis (PCA) with advanced deep learning (DL) models for real-time intrusion detection, significantly improving both computational efficiency and accuracy compared to previous methods. Specifically, five feature selection methods (correlation-based feature subset selection (CFS), Pearson analysis, gain ratio (GR), information gain (IG) and symmetrical uncertainty (SU)) were integrated with PCA to optimise feature dimensionality and enhance predictive performance. Three classifiers—artificial neural networks (ANNs), deep neural networks (DNNs), and TabNet–were evaluated on the RT-IoT2022 dataset. The ANN classifier combined with Pearson analysis and PCA achieved the highest intrusion detection accuracy of 99.7%, demonstrating substantial performance improvements over ANN alone (92%) and TabNet (94%) without feature selection. Key features identified by Pearson analysis included id.resp_p, service, fwd_init_window_size and flow_SYN_flag_count, which significantly contributed to the performance gains. These results indicate that combining Pearson analysis with PCA consistently improves classification performance across multiple models. Furthermore, the deployment of classifiers directly on the original dataset decreased the accuracy, emphasising the importance of feature selection in enhancing AIoT and IoT security. This predictive model strengthens IDS capabilities, enabling early threat detection and proactive mitigation strategies against cyberattacks in real-time AIoT environments.