KONGUNADU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND

TECHNOLOGY

AUTOMATED SPAM FILTERING: A

FUZZY SIMILARITY APPROACH

PRESENTED BY :

S.Phugalandran [1] M.Dineshkannan [2]

Final-year
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

phugal.capture@gmail.com [1]
Dinram.kannan@gmail.com[2]

9843980614 [1]
9790118512 [2]
 AUTOMATED SPAM FILTERING: A FUZZY
SIMILARITY APPROACH

S.Phugalandran [1] M.Dineshkannan [2]

Final-year
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Kongunadu College of Engineering and Technology

Phugal.capture@gmail.com [1] dinram.kannan@gmail.com [2]

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.
1. Introduction
With the increasing popularity
of electronic mail, several people and
companies found it an easy way to
distribute a massive amount of
unsolicited messages to a tremendous
number of users at a very low cost.
These unwanted bulk messages or junk
emails are called spam messages. E-
mail spam has continued to increase at
a very fast rate over the last couple of
years. It has become a major threat for
business users, network administrators
and even normal users.
A study in 2007 reported that
spam will continue to rise, reaching a
plateau at around 92% of e-mail traffic.
There is a prediction that by
year 2015 spam will exceed 95% of all
e-mail traffic. Spam can be very costly
to e- mail recipients; it reduces their
productivity by wasting their time and
causing annoyance to deal with a large
amount of spam. As a result, spam has
become an area of growing concern
attracting the attention of many
security researchers and practitioners.
Front-end filtering was the most
common and easier way to reject or
quarantine spam messages as early as
possible at the receiving server. In this
paper, we investigate an alternative
automated spam filtering technique
based on fuzzy similarity.
2. Spam-Filtering Methods
Spam-filtering methods are
classified into two broad categories:
non-machine learning based and
machine learning based.
Non machine learning methods
base their e-mail classification on a
predefined list of known spammers
and/or a list of keywords whereas
machine learning takes the content of
the message into its consideration and
adapts its decision accordingly.
3. Existing Systems
Some of the most widely
applied techniques in spam filtering:
 Bayesian Approach
In this technique, each
message is described by a set of
attributes (e.g. words or phrases).
Probabilities are assigned to each
attribute based on its number of
occurrences in the training corpus.
These probabilities are then used to
classify a message into the most
probable category by applying Bayes
theorem.
 Rule-Based Filtering
Usually, there is a certain
pattern used in spam, rule-based
filters examine messages for those
patterns following specific rules in
order to identify spam mails. The
Ripper algorithm is a typical a rule-
based classifier. This kind of filters
often scales relatively poorly with the
sample size.
 Support Vector Machines
(SVM)
Ducker et al used a support
vector machine for e-mail
classification based on the content.
Given the input as a binary feature
vector, the idea behind SVM is to find
a hyper plane that best separate data
points into two classes with maximum
margins between them. SVM is very
well suited for text categorization.
 Memory-Based (Instance-
Based) Approach
Sakkis et al proposed a
memory-based approach to antispam
filtering for mailing lists. In this
approach, each message in the
training examples is converted into a
vector representing the values of
different attributes of the message.
These vectors are stored in a memory
structure and are used directly to
classify e-mail messages. This method
uses a variant of the simple k nearest-
neighbor (k-NN) method in which the
classification is usually performed by
assigning to each unseen instance the
majority class of its k closest training
instances.
 Sparse Binary Polynomial
Hash (SBPH):
A generalization of Bayesian
that can match mutating phrases as
well as single words. By using SBPH,
a large amount of features can be
generated from an incoming text
automatically, and then a weight is
assigned to each feature according to
the probability of being spam or not.
 Rough Set Theory:
E-mail can be classified into
three categories: spam, non-spam and
suspicious. The results of their
experiments showed that rough set
based filters can reduce false positive
classification.
4. Proposed System
Although a variety of machine
learning techniques have been applied
to spam filtering, fuzzy logic has not
received much attention. A trainable
fuzzy logic based e-mail classification
system was presented to learn the most
effective fuzzy rules during the
training phase and then apply the
fuzzy control model to classify
unseen messages. Inspired by the
success of fuzzy similarity in text
classification and document
retrieval, it shows its effectiveness in
filtering spam based on the textual
content of e-mail messages.
5. Fuzzy similarity approach
Fuzzy logic deals with fuzzy
sets that allow partial membership in a
set. The membership in these vaguely
defined sets is represented by the
degree of relevance. This provides
flexibility in dealing with uncertainty
in systems such as spam filtering.
Using a fuzzy similarity approach, a
classification model is built from a set
of pre-classified e-mail instances.
5.1. Pre-processing
Before e-mail messages in the
given corpus are used for training and
classification, some preprocessing
needs to be done in order to reach
optimum results. First, all HTML tags
are stripped off. Then, all stop words,
i.e. words that appear frequently but
have low content discriminating
power, are removed from each e-mail
message. The message is then
tokenized into a set of strings
separated by some delimiters, e.g.
white spaces. These tokens (or terms)
can represent words, phrases or any
keyword patterns. All mixed-case
tokens are converted to lowercase.
The resulting set of tokens are
stemmed to their roots (i.e. replacing
each token with its base form) to avoid
treating different forms of the same
word as different attributes; thus
reducing the size of the attribute set.
Also if a token appears few times in
either category (e.g. less than three
times), it is removed. Hence, only
significant features with high
information gain are kept. Now, tokens
from all messages are combined into
one vector T= <t1, t2, …, tN> where N
is the total number of tokens.
Also the number of occurrences
of each token, in each category is
determined.
5.2. Training
During the training phase, a
model is built based on the
characteristics of each category in a
pre-classified set of e-mail messages.
The training dataset should be selected
in such a way that it is varying in
content and subject.
Each sample message is labeled
with a specific category. We first
perform pre-processing to extract
tokens and determine the number of
occurrences of each token in each
category. This implies that if a token
occurs only in one category, then its
membership to this category will be
one, and to the other category will be
zero. From these data, we define a
fuzzy token-category relation which
maps each element in T × C to a
membership value between 0 and 1.
This implies that if a token occurs only
in one category, then its membership to
this category will be one, and to the
other category will be zero.
Typically, the membership
values will range between zero and
one. The training process is illustrated
in Figure
5.3. Classification
Having constructed a
knowledge base for the token-category
membership, spam filtering is now
based on calculating the fuzzy
similarity measure between the
received message and each category.
The message is then classified by
comparing its fuzzy similarity
measures. In order to calculate fuzzy
similarity, we must first determine the
membership degree of each token to
the message. One way to do that is by
first determining the frequency of each
token in the message. The
membership degree is then defined
as the ratio of number of
occurrences of a token in the
message to the maximum number of
occurrences of the token in all
categories. Thus, the token with the
maximum number of occurrences will
be assigned a value of 1, and all other
tokens will be assigned proportional
values.
The fuzzy similarity measure
(SM) is given by using the fuzzy
conjunction operator and fuzzy
disjunction operator. In case a false
positive has the same weight as false
negative, then we can decide the
message category to be the one with
the highest similarity measure.
However, if false positive is
more serious than false negative, we
should have some threshold value such
that it is greater than 1. Then decide
based on the ratio of the similarity
measures, i.e., if the ratio of the spam
and legitimate contents is greater than
the threshold value, then the message
is spam.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, we presented a

fuzzy similarity based spam filtering
method. This method considers the
content of the message to predict its
category rather than relying on a
fixed pre-specified set of keywords.
Thus, it can adapt to spammer tactics
and dynamically build its knowledge
base.