An experimental comparison of naive Bayesian and keyword-based anti-spam filtering with personal e-mail messages

The growing problem of unsolicited bulk e-mail, also known as “spam”, has generated a need for reliable anti-spam e-mail filters. Filters of this type have so far been based mostly on manually constructed keyword patterns. An alternative approach has recently been proposed, whereby a Naive Bayesian classifier is trained automatically to detect spam messages. We test this approach on a large collection of personal e-mail messages, which we make publicly available in “encrypted” form contributing towards standard benchmarks. We introduce appropriate cost-sensitive measures, investigating at the same time the effect of attribute-set size, training-corpus size, lemmatization, and stop lists, issues that have not been explored in previous experiments. Finally, the Naive Bayesian filter is compared, in terms of performance, to a filter that uses keyword patterns, and which is part of a widely used e-mail reader.