A study of spam filtering using support vector machines

Abstract

Electronic mail is a major revolution taking place over traditional communication systems due to its convenient, economical, fast, and easy to use nature. A major bottleneck in electronic communications is the enormous dissemination of unwanted, harmful emails known as spam emails. A major concern is the developing of suitable filters that can adequately capture those emails and achieve high performance rate. Machine learning (ML) researchers have developed many approaches in order to tackle this problem. Within the context of machine learning, support vector machines (SVM) have made a large contribution to the development of spam email filtering. Based on SVM, different schemes have been proposed through text classification approaches (TC). A crucial problem when using SVM is the choice of kernels as they directly affect the separation of emails in the feature space. This paper presents thorough investigation of several distance-based kernels and specify spam filtering behaviors using SVM. The majority of used kernels in recent studies concern continuous data and neglect the structure of the text. In contrast to classical kernels, we propose the use of various string kernels for spam filtering. We show how effectively string kernels suit spam filtering problem. On the other hand, data preprocessing is a vital part of text classification where the objective is to generate feature vectors usable by SVM kernels. We detail a feature mapping variants in TC that yield improved performance for the standard SVM in filtering task. Furthermore, to cope for realtime scenarios we propose an online active framework for spam filtering. We present empirical results from an extensive study of online, transductive, and online active methods for classifying spam emails in real time. We show that active online method using string kernels achieves higher precision and recall rates.