A fuzzy similarity approach for automated spam filtering

  • Authors:
  • El-Sayed M. El-Alfy;Fares S. Al-Qunaieer

  • Affiliations:
  • College of Computer Sciences and Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum&Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia;Computer and Electronics Research Institute, King Abdulaziz City for Science&Technology, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia

  • Venue:
  • AICCSA '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/ACS International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

E-mail spam has become an epidemic problem that can negatively affect the usability of electronic mail as a communication means. Besides wasting users’ time and effort to scan and delete the massive amount of junk e-mails received; it consumes network bandwidth and storage space, slows down e-mail servers, and provides a medium to distribute harmful and/or offensive content. Several machine learning approaches have been applied to this problem. In this paper, we explore a new approach based on fuzzy similarity that can automatically classify e-mail messages as spam or legitimate. We study its performance for various conjunction and disjunction operators for several datasets. The results are promising as compared with a naïve Bayesian classifier. Classification accuracy above 97% and low false positive rates are achieved in many test cases.