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Record W1965231990 · doi:10.1145/2030376.2030391

Clustering for semi-supervised spam filtering

2011· article· en· W1965231990 on OpenAlex
John S. Whissell, Charles L. A. Clarke

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSpam and Phishing Detection
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceCluster analysisMedoidFilter (signal processing)Data miningArtificial intelligenceSet (abstract data type)Training setBag-of-words modelPartition (number theory)Pattern recognition (psychology)Machine learningMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We present a novel investigation of email clustering, demonstrating that clustering can be a powerful tool for email spam filtering. We first extend the well-known notion that ham and spam emails can be divided into clusters, showing the striking result that almost any reasonable clustering algorithm will naturally partition an email dataset into almost entirely spam and entirely spam clusters. We then consider the specific semi-supervised spam filtering scenario of filtering when a large amount of training data is available, but only a few true labels can be obtained for that data. We present two spam filtering approaches for this scenario, both of which start with a clustering of training email. Our first approach uses the true labels of the medoids of each cluster to train a spam filter; our second approach functions similar to the first, except that the true label of each cluster's medoid is used as the label of every email within the cluster, giving a much larger set of labels for training, while still only requiring only a few labels. We evaluate our approaches using the TREC2005 and CEAS2008 spam email datasets. For a large range of different numbers of true labels, we show that both of our approaches significantly outperform training on the same number of randomly selected email messages. The results of our second approach are also better than those of a previously published state-of-the-art semi-supervised small sample spam filtering approach.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.900
Threshold uncertainty score0.240

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.067
GPT teacher head0.235
Teacher spread0.169 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations21
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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