Neural Recognition and Genetic Features Selection for Robust Detection of E-Mail Spam

In this paper a method for feature selection and classification of email spam messages is presented. The selection of features is performed in two steps: The selection is performed by measuring their entropy and a fine-tuning selection is implemented using a genetic algorithm. In the classification process, a Radial Basis Function Network is used to ensure robust classification rate even in case of complex cluster structure. The proposed method shows that, when using a two-level feature selection, a better accuracy is achieved than using one-stage selection. Also, the use of a lemmatizer or a stop-word list gives minimal classification improvement. The proposed method achieves 96-97% average accuracy when using only 20 features out of 15000.