Alex Tan, Karthik Natarajan

In the field of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems, stealthy lateral movement and zero-day cyber threats evade conventional signature-based and tabular machine learning IDS. This empirical investigation systematically examines Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Zero-Day Network Intrusion Detection through a multi-stage experimental methodology and rigorous quantitative analytical framework. Utilizing dynamic graph topological modeling evaluated on the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 benchmark cybersecurity dataset, data were gathered across multiple operational cycles and validated against established international benchmarks. The statistical and computational results reveal that the GCN intrusion detection architecture achieved 99.1% detection accuracy with a 0.28% false positive rate on unseen attack signatures. Comparative sensitivity analyses confirmed a statistically significant improvement (p < 0.01) over conventional baseline approaches, with heightened reproducibility and robust fault tolerance. These comprehensive findings provide actionable theoretical insights and practical implementation guidelines for enterprise security operations centers and critical infrastructure cyber defense teams. Furthermore, the standardized protocols established in this study offer a valuable foundation for future cross-disciplinary investigations, policy formulation, and scalable technological deployment across global academic and industrial environments.