Detecting Spam E-mails with Content and Weight-Based Binomial Logistic Model

Abstract

Spam e-mails are continuously increasing and are a serious threats to a network and its users. Several efficient methods are available regarding this context, but still, it is evolving randomly. Considering this, the proposed approach addresses the problem of spam detection by combining traditional content-matching criteria with the modified version of the binomial logistic algorithm. The work generates seven categories for content-matching, which begins from three basic categories, namely: special words, adult content, and specific symbols and digits. The remaining four categories are derived from various possible combinations of these basic categories. The words selected for each category are carefully curated based on the human psychology of action and reaction. Then, a weight is assigned to each of the categories to signify their importance and a threshold criterion is deployed before implementing the binomial logistic algorithm, which not only increases the efficiency of the proposed algorithm but also reduces the rate of misclassification. The proposed model is tested on six separate datasets of Enron Spam Corpus, where 98.31% and 92.575% are the maximum and minimum accuracies achieved, respectively, in spam e-mail classification. The AUC_ROC scores for the entire Spam Corpus range between 0.927 and 0.983. A comparison is also carried out between the proposed algorithm and the other methods of spam detection that have logistic regression. Finally, the suggested method can adequately handle a large sample size without compromising the efficacy, which is measured using accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, and AUC_ROC score.