Study on the Effect of Preprocessing Methods for Spam Email Detection

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The use of email as a communication technology is now increasingly being exploited. Along with its progress, email spam problem becomes quite disturbing to email user. The resulting negative impacts make effective spam email detection techniques indispensable. A spam email detection algorithm or spam classifier will work effectively if supported by proper preprocessing steps (noise removal, stop words removal, stemming, lemmatization, term frequency). This research studies the effect of preprocessing steps on the performance of supervised spam classifier algorithms. Experiments were conducted on two widely used supervised spam classifier algorithms: Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machine. The evaluation is performed on the Ling-spam corpus dataset and uses evaluation metrics: accuracy. The experimental results show that different preprocessing steps give different effects to different classifier.