Comparison of Deep Learning and Traditional Methods for Email Spam Filtering

Abstract

Electronic mail, or email, is a method for communicating using the internet which is inexpensive, effective, and fast. Spam is a type of email where unwanted messages, usually unwanted commercial messages, are distributed in large quantities by a spammer. The objective of such behavior is to harm email users; these messages need to be detected and prevented from being sent to users in the first place. In order to filter these emails, the developers have used machine learning methods. This paper discusses different methods which are used deep learning methods such as a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models with(out) a GloVe model in order to classify spam and non-spam messages. These models are only based on email data, and the extraction set of features is automatic. In addition, our work provides a comparison between traditional machine learning and deep learning algorithms on spam datasets to find out the best way to intrusion detection. The results indicate that deep learning offers improved performance of precision, recall, and accuracy. As far as we are aware, deep learning methods show great promise in being able to filter email spam, therefore we have performed a comparison of various deep learning methods with traditional machine learning methods. Using a benchmark dataset consisting of 5,243 spam and 16,872 not-spam and SMS messages, the highest achieved accuracy score is 96.52% using CNN with the GloVe model.