A Novel Hybrid Approach for Email Spam Detection based on Scatter Search Algorithm and K-Nearest Neighbors

Because cyberspace and Internet predominate in the life of users, in addition to business opportunities and time reductions, threats like information theft, penetration into systems, etc. are included in the field of hardware and software. Security is the top priority to prevent a cyber-attack that users should initially be detecting the type of attacks because virtual environments are not monitored. Today, email is the foundation of many internet attacks that have happened. The Hackers and penetrators are using email spam as a way to penetrate into computer systems junk. Email can contain viruses, malware, and malicious code. Therefore, the type of email should be detected by security tools and avoid opening suspicious emails. In this paper, a new model has been proposed based on the hybrid of Scatter Searching Algorithm (SSA) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) to email spam detection. The Results of proposed model on Spambase dataset shows which our model has more accuracy with Feature Selection (FS) and in the best case, its percentage of accuracy is equal to 94.54% with 500 iterations and 57 features. Also, the comparison shows that the proposed model has better accuracy compared to the evolutionary algorithm (data mining and decision detection such as C4.5).