E-Mail Spam Filtering Through Feature Selection Using Enriched Firefly Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

E-mail is the most common method of communication because due to its ability to obtain, the rapid modification of messages and low cost of distribution. Spam causes traffic issues and bottlenecks that limit the amount of memory and bandwidth, power and computing speed. For data filtering, various approaches exist that automatically detect and suppress these indefensible messages. A methodology based on Sine- Cosine Algorithm (SCA) introduced which address the problem of space and time complexities are increased in E-Mail spam detection. In this method, WordNet optimized semantic ontology applies different methods based on semantics and similarity measures to reduce the large number of extracted textual features. This paper proposed the Enriched Firefly Optimization Algorithm (EFOA) method effectively selecting suitable features from an upper dimensional space using the fitness function. Once the best feature space is identified through EFOA, the spam classification is done using ANN. Intially, E-mail spam dataset is preprocessed, then the extracted textual features are Semantic-based reduction and Features weights updated using optimized semantic WordNet. The results obtained showed that the ANN classifier after selection of features using EFOA was able to classify e-mails as spam and non-spam. This EFOA demonstrates that the proposed method has led to a remarkable improvement compared to the SCA methods.