Using GMDH-based networks for improved spam detection and email feature analysis

Unsolicited or spam email has recently become a major threat that can negatively impact the usability of electronic mail. Spam substantially wastes time and money for business users and network administrators, consumes network bandwidth and storage space, and slows down email servers. In addition, it provides a medium for distributing harmful code and/or offensive content. In this paper, we explore the application of the GMDH (Group Method of Data Handling) based inductive learning approach in detecting spam messages by automatically identifying content features that effectively distinguish spam from legitimate emails. We study the performance for various network model complexities using spam-base, a publicly available benchmark dataset. Results reveal that classification accuracies of 91.7% can be achieved using only 10 out of the available 57 attributes, selected through abductive learning as the most effective feature subset (i.e. 82.5% data reduction). We also show how to improve classification performance using abductive network ensembles (committees) trained on different subsets of the training data. Comparison with other techniques such as neural networks and naive Bayesian classifiers shows that the GMDH-based learning approach can provide better spam detection accuracy with false-positive rates as low as 4.3% and yet requires shorter training time. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.