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Catching the Drift: Using Feature-Free Case-Based Reasoning for Spam Filtering

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Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development (ICCBR 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4626))

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Abstract

In this paper, we compare case-based spam filters, focusing on their resilience to concept drift. In particular, we evaluate how to track concept drift using a case-based spam filter that uses a feature-free distance measure based on text compression. In our experiments, we compare two ways to normalise such a distance measure, finding that the one proposed in [1] performs better. We show that a policy as simple as retaining misclassified examples has a hugely beneficial effect on handling concept drift in spam but, on its own, it results in the case base growing by over 30%. We then compare two different retention policies and two different forgetting policies (one a form of instance selection, the other a form of instance weighting) and find that they perform roughly as well as each other while keeping the case base size constant. Finally, we compare a feature-based textual case-based spam filter with our feature-free approach. In the face of concept drift, the feature-based approach requires the case base to be rebuilt periodically so that we can select a new feature set that better predicts the target concept. We find feature-free approaches to have lower error rates than their feature-based equivalents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

    Sarah Jane Delany

  2. University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Derek Bridge

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  1. Sarah Jane Delany
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  2. Derek Bridge
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Rosina O. Weber Michael M. Richter

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Delany, S.J., Bridge, D. (2007). Catching the Drift: Using Feature-Free Case-Based Reasoning for Spam Filtering. In: Weber, R.O., Richter, M.M. (eds) Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development. ICCBR 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4626. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74141-1_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74141-1_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74138-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74141-1

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