Abstract: Emails are an integral part of communication in today’s world. But Spam emails are a hindrance, leading to reduction in efficiency, security threats and wastage of bandwidth. Hence, they need to be filtered at the first filtering station, so that employees are spared the drudgery of handling them. Most of the earlier approaches are mainly focused on building content-based filters using body of an email message. Use of selected header features to filter spam, is a better strategy, which was initiated by few researchers. In this context, our research intends to find out minimum number of features required to classify spam and ham emails. A set of experiments was conducted with three datasets and five Feature Selection techniques namely Chi-square, Correlation, Relief Feature Selection, Information Gain, and Wrapper. Five-classification algorithms-Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, NBTree, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine were used. In most of the approaches, a trade-off exists between improper filtering and number of features. Hence arriving at an optimum set of features is a challenge. Our results show that in order to achieve the objective of satisfactory filtering, minimum 5 and maximum 14 features are required.

Priti Kulkarni, Jatinderkumar R. Saini and Haridas Acharya, “Effect of Header-based Features on Accuracy of Classifiers for Spam Email Classification” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 11(3), 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110350

@article{Kulkarni2020,
title = {Effect of Header-based Features on Accuracy of Classifiers for Spam Email Classification},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110350},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110350},
year = {2020},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {11},
number = {3},
author = {Priti Kulkarni and Jatinderkumar R. Saini and Haridas Acharya}
}