In recent years, as intrusion attacks on IoT networks have grown
exponentially, there is an immediate need for sophisticated intrusion detection
systems (IDSs). A vast majority of current IDSs are data-driven, which means
that one of the most important aspects of this area of research is the quality
of the data acquired from IoT network traffic. Two of the most cited intrusion
detection datasets are the KDDCup99 and the NSL-KDD. The main goal of our
project was to conduct a robust comparison of both datasets by evaluating the
performance of various Machine Learning (ML) classifiers trained on them with a
larger set of classification metrics than previous researchers. From our
research, we were able to conclude that the NSL-KDD dataset is of a higher
quality than the KDDCup99 dataset as the classifiers trained on it were on
average 20.18% less accurate. This is because the classifiers trained on the
KDDCup99 dataset exhibited a bias towards the redundancies within it, allowing
them to achieve higher accuracies.