Boosting Trees for Anti-Spam Email Filtering

This paper describes a set of comparative experiments for the problem of automatically filtering unwanted electronic mail messages. Several variants of the AdaBoost algorithm with confidence-rated predictions [Schapire & Singer, 99] have been applied, which differ in the complexity of the base learners considered. Two main conclusions can be drawn from our experiments: a) The boosting-based methods clearly outperform the baseline learning algorithms (Naive Bayes and Induction of Decision Trees) on the PU1 corpus, achieving very high levels of the F1 measure; b) Increasing the complexity of the base learners allows to obtain better “high-precision” classifiers, which is a very important issue when misclassification costs are considered.