An Improved Machine Learning-Based Short Message Service Spam Detection System

Abstract

The use of Short Message Services (SMS) as a mechanism of communication has resulted to loss of sensitive information such as credit card details, medical information and bank account details (user name and password). Several Machine learning-based approaches have been proposed to address this problem, but they are still unable to detect modified SMS spam messages more accurately. Thus, in this research, a stack- ensemble of four machine learning algorithms consisting of Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and Support Vector Machine (SVM), were employed to detect more accurately SMS spams. The simulation was carried out using Python Scikit- learn tools. The performance evaluation of the proposed model was carried out by benchmarking it with an existing model. The evaluation results showed that the proposed model has an increase of 3.03% of accuracy, 8.94% of Recall, 2.17% of F-measure; and a decrease of 4.55% of Precision over the existing model. This indicates that the proposed model reduces the false alarm rate and thus detects spams more accurately.  In conclusion, the ensemble method performed better than any individual algorithms and can be adopted by the Network service providers for better Quality of Service.