The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand rapidly, resulting in increasingly heterogeneous and complex wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Traditional anomaly detection approaches cannot cope with dynamic traffic patterns, high data volumes, and strict resource constraints. This study presents a hybrid XGBoost–CNN model that integrates XGBoost-based feature selection with a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network optimized for IoT environments. The proposed model was evaluated using real-world IoT traffic data and benchmarked against XGBoost, KNN, and SVM. Experimental results show that the hybrid approach improves detection accuracy by over 1%, increases throughput by 22–40%, and r... More >