Spambase
Donated on 6/30/1999
Classifying Email as Spam or Non-Spam
Dataset Characteristics
Multivariate
Subject Area
Computer Science
Associated Tasks
Classification
Feature Type
Integer, Real
# Instances
4601
# Features
57
Dataset Information
What do the instances in this dataset represent?
Emails
Additional Information
The "spam" concept is diverse: advertisements for products/web sites, make money fast schemes, chain letters, pornography... The classification task for this dataset is to determine whether a given email is spam or not. Our collection of spam e-mails came from our postmaster and individuals who had filed spam. Our collection of non-spam e-mails came from filed work and personal e-mails, and hence the word 'george' and the area code '650' are indicators of non-spam. These are useful when constructing a personalized spam filter. One would either have to blind such non-spam indicators or get a very wide collection of non-spam to generate a general purpose spam filter. For background on spam: Cranor, Lorrie F., LaMacchia, Brian A. Spam!, Communications of the ACM, 41(8):74-83, 1998. Typical performance is around ~7% misclassification error. False positives (marking good mail as spam) are very undesirable.If we insist on zero false positives in the training/testing set, 20-25% of the spam passed through the filter. See also Hewlett-Packard Internal-only Technical Report. External version forthcoming.
Has Missing Values?
Yes
Variables Table
| Variable Name | Role | Type | Demographic | Description | Units | Missing Values |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| word_freq_make | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_address | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_all | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_3d | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_our | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_over | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_remove | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_internet | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_order | Feature | Continuous | no | |||
| word_freq_mail | Feature | Continuous | no |
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Additional Variable Information
The last column of 'spambase.data' denotes whether the e-mail was considered spam (1) or not (0), i.e. unsolicited commercial e-mail. Most of the attributes indicate whether a particular word or character was frequently occuring in the e-mail. The run-length attributes (55-57) measure the length of sequences of consecutive capital letters. For the statistical measures of each attribute, see the end of this file. Here are the definitions of the attributes: 48 continuous real [0,100] attributes of type word_freq_WORD = percentage of words in the e-mail that match WORD, i.e. 100 * (number of times the WORD appears in the e-mail) / total number of words in e-mail. A "word" in this case is any string of alphanumeric characters bounded by non-alphanumeric characters or end-of-string. 6 continuous real [0,100] attributes of type char_freq_CHAR] = percentage of characters in the e-mail that match CHAR, i.e. 100 * (number of CHAR occurences) / total characters in e-mail 1 continuous real [1,...] attribute of type capital_run_length_average = average length of uninterrupted sequences of capital letters 1 continuous integer [1,...] attribute of type capital_run_length_longest = length of longest uninterrupted sequence of capital letters 1 continuous integer [1,...] attribute of type capital_run_length_total = sum of length of uninterrupted sequences of capital letters = total number of capital letters in the e-mail 1 nominal {0,1} class attribute of type spam = denotes whether the e-mail was considered spam (1) or not (0), i.e. unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Baseline Model Performance
Papers Citing this Dataset
By Cèsar Ferri, José Hernández-Orallo, Peter Flach. 2019
Published in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
By Jianqing Fan, Yongyi Guo, Kaizheng Wang. 2019
Published in ArXiv.
By Yuxin Ma, Tiankai Xie, Jundong Li, Ross Maciejewski. 2019
Published in ArXiv.
By Hakan Gokcesu, Suleyman Kozat. 2019
Published in ArXiv.
By Carlo Baldassi. 2019
Published in ArXiv.
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Hopkins,Mark, Reeber,Erik, Forman,George, and Suermondt,Jaap. (1999). Spambase. UCI Machine Learning Repository. https://doi.org/10.24432/C53G6X.
@misc{misc_spambase_94,
author = {Hopkins,Mark, Reeber,Erik, Forman,George, and Suermondt,Jaap},
title = {{Spambase}},
year = {1999},
howpublished = {UCI Machine Learning Repository},
note = {{DOI}: https://doi.org/10.24432/C53G6X}
}pip install ucimlrepo
from ucimlrepo import fetch_ucirepo # fetch dataset spambase = fetch_ucirepo(id=94) # data (as pandas dataframes) X = spambase.data.features y = spambase.data.targets # metadata print(spambase.metadata) # variable information print(spambase.variables)
Creators
Mark Hopkins
Erik Reeber
George Forman
Jaap Suermondt
DOI
License
This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
This allows for the sharing and adaptation of the datasets for any purpose, provided that the appropriate credit is given.