Tree-based text stream clustering with application to spam mail classification

Abstract

This paper proposes a new text clustering algorithm based on a tree structure. The main idea of the clustering algorithm is a sub-tree at a specific node represents a document cluster. Our clustering algorithm is a single pass scanning algorithm which traverses down the tree to search for all clusters without having to predefine the number of clusters. Thus, it fits our objectives to produce document clusters having high cohesion, and to keep the minimum number of clusters. Moreover, an incremental learning process will perform after a new document is inserted into the tree, and the clusters will be rebuilt to accommodate the new information. In addition, we applied the proposed clustering algorithm to spam mail classification and the experimental results show that tree-based text clustering spam filter gives higher accuracy and specificity than the cobweb clustering, naive Bayes and KNN.