Spam Email Classifier – IT and Computer Engineering Guide
1. Project Overview
Objective: Classify emails as spam or not spam using machine
learning algorithms.
Scope: Implement a spam classifier using Naive Bayes or Support Vector Machines
(SVM) with email datasets.
2. Prerequisites
Knowledge: Understanding of Python programming, text
preprocessing, and classification algorithms.
Tools: Python, Scikit-learn, NLTK or spaCy, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib.
Dataset: Public email datasets like the SpamAssassin or Enron dataset.
3. Project Workflow
- Data Collection: Obtain a labeled email dataset with spam and non-spam emails.
- Data Preprocessing: Clean the dataset, remove stop words, and apply text vectorization.
- Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Visualize word frequencies and email characteristics.
- Model Development: Train a Naive Bayes classifier or SVM model on the vectorized text data.
- Model Evaluation: Use metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and ROC-AUC.
- Optimization: Fine-tune model parameters and test with different feature extraction techniques.
- Deployment: Integrate the classifier into an email client or web service.
4. Technical Implementation
Step 1: Import Libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer, TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.naive_bayes import MultinomialNB
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn.metrics import classification_report, confusion_matrix,
roc_auc_score
Step 2: Load and Preprocess the Dataset
# Example for loading a CSV dataset
data = pd.read_csv('emails.csv')
data['text'] = data['text'].str.lower()
data['text'] = data['text'].str.replace(r'[^a-zA-Z]', ' ', regex=True)
# Vectorization
vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer(stop_words='english', max_features=5000)
X = vectorizer.fit_transform(data['text'])
y = data['label']
Step 3: Split the Dataset
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2,
random_state=42)
Step 4: Train Naive Bayes Classifier
nb_model = MultinomialNB()
nb_model.fit(X_train, y_train)
nb_predictions = nb_model.predict(X_test)
print(classification_report(y_test, nb_predictions))
Step 5: Train SVM Classifier
svm_model = SVC(kernel='linear', probability=True)
svm_model.fit(X_train, y_train)
svm_predictions = svm_model.predict(X_test)
print(classification_report(y_test, svm_predictions))
5. Results and Visualization
Visualize the confusion matrix for both models.
Compare performance using precision-recall curves and ROC curves.
6. Challenges and Mitigation
Imbalanced Dataset: Use techniques like oversampling,
undersampling, or class weighting.
Feature Relevance: Experiment with different text vectorization methods like
TF-IDF and Word2Vec.
7. Future Enhancements
Incorporate deep learning techniques such as Recurrent
Neural Networks (RNNs) for improved accuracy.
Extend the system to classify other forms of text data.
8. Conclusion
The Spam Email Classifier project demonstrates the practical
application of machine learning in natural language processing tasks.
It highlights the workflow from preprocessing to model deployment.