Spam Mail Detection through Data Mining – A Comparative Performance Analysis

As web is expanding day by day and people generally rely on web for communication so e-mails are the fastest way to send information from one place to another. Now a day's all the transactions all the communication whether general or of business taking place through e-mails. E-mail is an effective tool for communication as it saves a lot of time and cost. But emails are also affected by attacks which include Spam Mails. Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send bulk data. Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. In this study, we analyze various data mining approach to spam dataset in order to find out the best classifier for email classification. In this paper we analyze the performance of various classifiers with feature selection algorithm and without feature selection algorithm. Initially we experiment with the entire dataset without selecting the features and apply classifiers one by one and check the results. Then we apply Best-First feature selection algorithm in order to select the desired features and then apply various classifiers for classification. In this study it has been found that results are improved in terms of accuracy when we embed feature selection process in the experiment. Finally we found Random Tree as best classifier for spam mail classification with accuracy = 99.72%. Still none of the algorithm achieves 100% accuracy in classifying spam emails but Random Tree is very nearby to that.