•Utilise the NSL-KDD data set and the binary and multiclass problem with a 20% training dataset.•This paper studied a new model that can be used to estimate the intrusion scope threshold degree.•The experimental result revealed that the hybrid approach had a significant effect on the minimisation of the computational and time complexity.•The accuracy of the proposed model was satisfactory at 99.77% and 99.63% for the binary class and multiclass NSL-KDD data sets, respectively. Efficiently detecting network intrusions requires the gathering of sensitive information. This means that one has to collect large amounts of network transactions including high details of recent network transactions. Assessments based on meta-heuristic anomaly are important in the intrusion related network transaction data’s exploratory analysis. These assessments are needed to make and deliver predictions related to the intrusion possibility based on the available attribute details that are involved in the network transaction. We were able to utilize the NSL-KDD data set, the binary and multiclass problem with a 20% testing dataset. This paper develops a new hybrid model that can be used to estimate the intrusion scope threshold degree based on the network transaction data’s optimal features that were made available for training. The experimental results revealed that the hybrid approach had a significant effect on the minimisation of the computational and time complexity involved when determining the feature association impact scale. The accuracy of the proposed model was measured as 99.81% and 98.56% for the binary class and multiclass NSL-KDD data sets, respectively. However, there are issues with obtaining high false and low false negative rates. A hybrid approach with two main parts is proposed to address these issues. First, data needs to be filtered using the Vote algorithm with Information Gain that combines the probability distributions of these base learners in order to select the important features that positively affect the accuracy of the proposed model. Next, the hybrid algorithm consists of following classifiers: J48, Meta Pagging, RandomTree, REPTree, AdaBoostM1, DecisionStump and NaiveBayes. Based on the results obtained using the proposed model, we observe improved accuracy, high false negative rate, and low false positive rule.