Advances in spam detection for email spam, web spam, social network spam, and review spam: ML-based and nature-inspired-based techniques

Abstract

Despite the great advances in spam detection, spam remains a major problem that has affected the global economy enormously. Spam attacks are popularly perpetrated through different digital platforms with a large electronic audience, such as emails, microblogging websites (e.g. Twitter), social networks (e.g. Facebook), and review sites (e.g. Amazon). Different spam detection solutions have been proposed in the literature, however, Machine Learning (ML) based solutions are one of the most effective. Nevertheless, most ML algorithms have computational complexity problem, thus some studies introduced Nature Inspired (NI) algorithms to further improve the speed and generalization performance of ML algorithms. This study presents a survey of recent ML-based and NI-based spam detection techniques to empower the research community with information that is suitable for designing effective spam filtering systems for emails, social networks, microblogging, and review websites. The recent success and prevalence of deep learning show that it can be used to solve spam detection problems. Moreover, the availability of large-scale spam datasets makes deep learning and big data solutions (such as Mahout) very suitable for spam detection. Few studies explored deep learning algorithms and big data solutions for spam detection. Besides, most of the datasets used in the literature are either small or synthetically created. Therefore, future studies can consider exploring big data solutions, big datasets, and deep learning algorithms for building efficient spam detection techniques.