Rough sets for spam filtering: Selecting appropriate decision rules for boundary e-mail classification

Nowadays, spam represents an extensive subset of the information delivered through Internet involving all unsolicited and disturbing communications received while using different services including e-mail, weblogs and forums. In this context, this paper reviews and brings together previous approaches and novel alternatives for applying rough set (RS) theory to the spam filtering domain by defining three different rule execution schemes: MFD (most frequent decision), LNO (largest number of objects) and LTS (largest total strength). With the goal of correctly assessing the suitability of the proposed algorithms, we specifically address and analyse significant questions for appropriate model validation like corpus selection, preprocessing and representational issues, as well as different specific benchmarking measures. From the experiments carried out using several execution schemes for selecting appropriate decision rules generated by rough sets, we conclude that the proposed algorithms can outperform other well-known anti-spam filtering techniques such as support vector machines (SVM), Adaboost and different types of Bayes classifiers.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slideHighlights► Review of rough sets for spam filtering. ► Rule execution schemes for RS-generated rules. ► Theoretical and practical issues in anti-spam filtering domain. ► Content-based model evaluation for spam filtering.