Assignment

It can be useful to be able to classify new “test” documents using already classified “training” documents. A common example is using a corpus of labeled spam and ham (non-spam) e-mails to predict whether or not a new document is spam.

For this project, you can start with a spam/ham data-set, then predict the class of new documents (either withheld from the training data-set or from another source such as your own spam folder). One example corpus: https://spamassassin.apache.org/old/publiccorpus/

Solution

Overview

Executive Summary

The tm package will be used to create a corpus of data which will serve as the source of features and observations for the analysis. This will then be converted into a document-term matrix. Finally, The caret package will be used for the model fitting, validation, and testing.

The process of building a ham/spam filter is an oft-used pedagogical tool when teaching predictive modeling. Therefore, there is a multitude of information available on-line and in texts, of which we availed ourselves.

It should be noted that one of the more common packages in recent use for text mining, the RTextTools package was recently removed from CRAN, and personal communication by one of us with the author (who is now building the news feed at LinkedIn) confirmed that the package is abandonware.

Lastly, we understand that the object of this exercise is not to build an excellent predictor but to demonstrate the necessary knowledge required to build classification algorithms.

Document-Term Matrix

A document-term matrix (DTM) is the model matrix used in natural language processing (NLP). Its rows represent the documents in the corpus and its columns represent the selected terms or tokens which are treated as features. The values in each cell depends on the weighting schema selected. The simplest is term-frequency (tf). This is just the number of times the word is found in that document. A more sophisticated weighting scheme is term frequency–inverse document frequency (tf-idf). This measure increases with the frequency of the term, but offsets it by the number of documents in which it appears. This will lower the predictive power of words that naturally appear very often in all kinds of documents, and so do not shed much light on the type of document. This problem is also addressed by removing words so common as to have no predictive power at all like “and” or “the”. These are often called stop words.

Code and Process

Style

In the following document, all user-created variables will be in snake_case and all user-created functions will be in CamelCase. Unfortunately, the tm packages uses camelCase for its functions. wE aPoLoGIze fOr anY IncoNVenIence.

Load Libraries and Set Seed

# allows us to repeat analysis with same outcomes
set.seed(12)

# Enable parallel processing to speed up code
library(doParallel)    # library to enable parallel processing to leverage multiple CPU's & Cores
num_cores <- detectCores() - 1

#registerDoParallel(cores=num_cores)  
cl <- makeCluster(num_cores, type="FORK")

#cl <- makePSOCKcluster(6L)
registerDoParallel(cl)

library(tm)            # tool to facilitate building corpus of data
library(SnowballC)     # tools to find word stems
library(caret)         # tools to run machine learning
library(wordcloud)     # tool to help build vidual wordclouds
library(tidyverse)

List files

The files were downloaded from the link above, and the spam_2 and easy_ham sets were selected for analysis. These were unzipped so that each email is its own file in the directory.

# Get a list of all the spam file names (each file is a single email message)
s_files <- list.files("./Data/spam_2", full.names = TRUE)
s_len <- length(s_files)

# Get a list of all the ham files names (each file is a single email message)
h_files <- list.files("./Data/easy_ham", full.names = TRUE)
h_len <- length(h_files)

We loaded {r} s_len spam email messages and {r} h_len ham (non-spam) email messages. The first thing to note is that we have an unbalanced data set with more good email messages (ham) than spam. This may affect our choice of models and/or force us to take extra steps to accomodate the difference in set sizes.

Building the Corpus

Email Headers

We will be focusing on email content, and not the meta information or doing reverse DNS lookups. Therefore, it makes sense to remove the email headers. According to the most recent RFC about email, RFC 5322, Section 2.2, the header should not contain any purely blank lines. Therefore, it is a very reasonable approach to look for the first blank line and only start ingesting the email from the next line. That is what is searched for by the regex pattern "^$" in the function below.

In the headers, some information that could be used to enhance a model might include: the Subject line, sender’s email address domain name (e.g. @gmail.com, @companyname.com, etc), whether the sender’s email domain matches the sender’s SMTP server domain name, the hour (UTC) when the email was sent, the origin country (based on SMTP server name or IP address lookup), and potentially information about the originating domain name (e.g. when was he domain registered). If this was a critical project, we could also download RBL (realtime blakc lists) and use that information to provide additional pattern matching.

Raw Corpus

The readLines function reads each line as a separate vector. To turn this into a single character vector, the paste function is used with the appropriate sep and collapse values. The class of the document is passed as a parameter to the BuildCorpus function.

#' Build a corpus from a list of file names
#' 
#' @param files List of documents to load.
#' @param class The class to be applied to the loaded documents
#' @return A charater vector
BuildCorpus <- function(files, class) {
  # loop thru files and process each one as we go
  for (i in seq_along(files)) { 
    raw_text <- readLines(files[i])
    em_length <- length(raw_text)
    
    # Lets extract the Subject line (if present) and clean it   
    subject_line <- str_extract(raw_text, "^Subject: (.*)$")
    subject_line <- subject_line[!is.na(subject_line)]
    subject_line <- iconv(subject_line, to="UTF-8")
    
    # let's scrub / clean up the subject line text
    subject_line <- gsub("[^0-9A-Za-z///' ]","" , subject_line, ignore.case = TRUE, useBytes = TRUE)
    subject_line <- tolower(subject_line)
    subject_line <- str_replace_all(subject_line, "(\\[)|(\\])|(re )|(subject )", "")

    # Lets extract the email body content
    body_start <- min(grep("^$", raw_text, fixed = FALSE, useBytes = TRUE)) + 1L
    em_body <- paste(raw_text[body_start:em_length], sep="", collapse=" ")
    em_body <- iconv(em_body, to="UTF-8")
    
    # make the text lower case
    em_body <- tolower(em_body)
        
    # remove HTML tags
    em_body <- str_replace_all(em_body, "(<[^>]*>)", "")
    em_body <- str_replace_all(em_body, "(&.*;)", "")

    # remove any URL's
    em_body <- str_replace_all(em_body, "http(s)?:(.*) ", " ")

    # remove non alpha (leave lower case and apostrophe for contractions)
    em_body <- str_replace_all(em_body, "[^a-z///' ]", "")
    em_body <- str_replace_all(em_body, "''|' ", "")

    # Since the subject line might have important info, lets concatenate it to the top of the email body
    em_body <- paste(c(subject_line, em_body), sep="", collapse=" ")
    
    if (i == 1L) {
      ret_Corpus <- VCorpus(VectorSource(em_body))
    } else {
      tmp_Corpus <- VCorpus(VectorSource(em_body))
      ret_Corpus <- c(ret_Corpus, tmp_Corpus)
    }
  }
  
  meta(ret_Corpus, tag = "class", type = "indexed") <- class
  
  return(ret_Corpus)
}

h_corp_raw <- BuildCorpus(h_files, "ham")
s_corp_raw <- BuildCorpus(s_files, "spam")

Cleaning the Corpus

We used many of the default cleaning tools in the tm package to perform standard adjustments like lower-casing, removing numbers, etc. We made two non-native adjustments. First we stripped out anything that looked like a URL. This needed to be done prior to removing punctuation, of course. We also added a few words to the removal list which we think have little predictive power due to their overuse. We considered removing all punctuation, but decided to leave both intra-word contractions and internal punctuation.

Lastly, we used the SnowballC package to stem the document. This process tries to identify common roots shared by similar words and then treat them as one. For example:

wordStem(c('run', 'running', 'ran', 'runt'), language = 'porter')
## [1] "run"  "run"  "ran"  "runt"

The complete cleaning rules are in the CleanCorpus function.

# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47410866/r-inspect-document-term-matrix-results-in-error-repeated-indices-currently-not
#' Scrub the text in a corpus
#' @param corpus A text corpus prepared by tm
#' @return A sanitized corpus
CleanCorpus <- function(corpus){
  overused_words <- c("ok", 'okay', 'day', "might", "bye", "hello", "hi",
                      "dear", "thank", "you", "please", "sorry")

  # lower case everything
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, content_transformer(tolower))
  
  # remove any HTML markup
  removeHTMLTags <- function(x) {gsub("(<[^>]*>)", "", x)}
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, content_transformer(removeHTMLTags))

  # remove any URL's
  StripURL <- function(x) {gsub("(http[^ ]*)|(www\\.[^ ]*)", "", x)}
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, content_transformer(StripURL))
  
  # remove anything not a simple letter
  KeepAlpha <- function(x) {gsub("[^a-z///-///' ]", "", x, ignore.case = TRUE, useBytes = TRUE)}
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, content_transformer(KeepAlpha))

  # remove any numbers
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeNumbers)
  
  # remove punctuation
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation,
                   preserve_intra_word_contractions = TRUE,
                   preserve_intra_word_dashes = TRUE)
  
  # remove any stop words
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, stopwords("english"))
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, overused_words)
  
  # remove extra white space
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, stripWhitespace)
  
  # use the SnowballC stem algorithm to find the root stem of similar words
  corpus <- tm_map(corpus, stemDocument)
  
  return(corpus)
}

Removing Very Sparse Terms

Even with a cleaned corpus, the overwhelming majority of the terms are rare. There are two ways to address sparsity of terms in the tm package. The first is to generate a list of words that appear at least \(k\) times in the corpus. This is done using the findFreqTerms command. Then the document-term matrix (DTM) can be built using only those words.

The second way is to build the DTM with all words, and then remove the words that don’t appear in at least \(p\%\) of documents. This is done using the removeSparseTerms function in tm. Both methods make manual inspection of more than one line of the matrix impossible. The matrix is stored sparsely as a triplet, and once terms are removed, it becomes impossible for R to print properly.

The removeSparseTerms is intuitively more appealing as it measures frequency by document, and not across documents. However, applying that to three separate corpuses would result in the validation and testing sets not having the same words as the training set. Therefore, the build-up method will be used, but used by finding the remaining terms after calling remove.

However, before we do that, we need to discuss…

Training, Validation, and Testing

Hastie & Tibshirani, in their seminal work ESL, suggest breaking ones data into three parts: 50% training, 25% validation, and 25% testing. Confusingly, some literature uses “test” for the validation set and “holdout” for the test set. Regardless, the idea is that you train your model on 50% of the data, and use 25% of the data (the validation set) to refine any hyper-parameters of the model. You do this for each model, and then once all the models are tuned as best possible, they are compared with each other by their performance on the heretofore unused testing/holdout set. The SplitSample function was used to split the data at the start.

# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47410866/r-inspect-document-term-matrix-results-in-error-repeated-indices-currently-not
#' Split a sample into Training, Validation and Test groups.  Return a vector with the label for each sample using 
#' the provided probabilities.  Note: training, validation and test should be non-negative and, not all zero.
#' @param n The total number of samples in the set
#' @param n Desired training set size (percent)
#' @param n Desired validation set size (percent)
#' @param n Desired test set size (percent)
#' @return A sanitized corpus
SplitSample <- function(n, training=0.5, validation=0.25, test=0.25) {
  if((training >= 0 && validation >= 0 && test >= 0) && 
     ((training + validation + test) > 0) && 
     ((training + validation + test) <= 1.0 )) {
    n_split <- sample(x = c("train", "validate", "test"), size = n,
                    replace = TRUE, prob = c(0.5, 0.25, 0.25))
  } else {
    n_split <- FALSE
  }
  
  return(n_split)
}

# build vectors that identify which group each sample will be placed (training, validation or test)
h_split <- SplitSample(h_len)
s_split <- SplitSample(s_len)

Note that with machine learning, another popular approach is to setup K-fold Cross Validation. With this approach, we create a Training/Testing split as shown above, train a model, then repeat the process with a different random Training/Testing splits. By iterating (typically 5-10 times), we ensure that every observation has a chance of being included during Training or Testing and can appear in any split group. We then average the performance metrics and use that to evaluate the model. This helps reduce bias that might have been introduced by random chance with just a single Training/Testing split.

If there are limited number of samples to work with, thus limiting the information available during the training phase, it is common to compromise and use a 70%/30% or 80%/20% Training to Testing split and skip the third Validation set. If there are limited observations, Bootstrapping is one method for generating additional data and works well if the known samples provide sufficient reprentation of the expected distribution of possible values or datapoints.

When we have the possibility of multiple rows from the same source, there is the possibility of leakage between the training and test/validation sets such that the model performs better on the validation and/or test sets than expected. We are not going to consider this now, but a more rigorous model would tag each row with the sender’s email address and/or IP address and use groupKFold() or some other similar technique to ensures all rows from a given sender are kept together in the same data set (trainng, validation or test). See https://topepo.github.io/caret/data-splitting.html for more information. Note that this approach can lead to complexity … for further discussion, see https://towardsdatascience.com/the-story-of-a-bad-train-test-split-3343fcc33d2c.

Building the Term List

As both training and validation are part of the model construction, we feel that the term list can be built from the combination of the two. The terms in the testing/holdout set will not be seen prior to testing. We will restrict the word list to words that appear in at least 100 of the combined 2922 documents. In a real world scenario, email messages may contain new terms not seen suring the training steps. By excluding the final validation terms, we better simulate a realworld implementation where new words are appearing that we didn’t have available during model training

# pull all terms from the training sets (both hame and spam)
raw_train <- c(h_corp_raw[h_split == "train"],
               s_corp_raw[s_split == "train"])

# pull all terms from the validation sets (both hame and spam)
raw_val <- c(h_corp_raw[h_split == "validate"],
             s_corp_raw[s_split == "validate"])

# pull all terms from the test sets (both hame and spam)
raw_test <- c(h_corp_raw[h_split == "test"],
              s_corp_raw[s_split == "test"])

# combine both training and test terms into a master list
raw_term_corp <- c(raw_train, raw_val)
clean_term_corp <- CleanCorpus(raw_term_corp)

dtm_terms <- DocumentTermMatrix(clean_term_corp, control = list(bounds = list(global = c(100L, Inf))))

freq_terms <- Terms(dtm_terms)

Here are the top 20 stemmed terms out of the 273 terms we will use in the dictionary:

ft <- colSums(as.matrix(dtm_terms))
ft_df <- data.frame(term = names(ft), count = as.integer(ft))
knitr::kable(head(ft_df[order(ft, decreasing = TRUE), ], n = 20L),
             row.names = FALSE)
term count
email 1802
will 1624
use 1406
can 1351
get 1340
just 996
mail 986
one 970
list 957
messag 928
time 924
work 921
free 889
make 842
like 835
now 789
peopl 781
new 740
receiv 716
click 628

Here is a histogram of word frequency using the Freedman-Diaconis rule for binwidth.

bw_fd <- 2 * IQR(ft_df$count) / (dim(ft_df)[[1]]) ^ (1/3)
ggplot(ft_df, aes(x = count)) + geom_histogram(binwidth = bw_fd) + xlab("Term")

Finally, a wordcloud of the stemmed terms appearing at least 250 times:

wordcloud(ft_df$term,ft_df$count, scale = c(3, 0.6), min.freq = 250L,
          colors = brewer.pal(5, "Dark2"), random.color = TRUE,
          random.order = TRUE, rot.per = 0, fixed.asp = FALSE)

Building the Training Set

# sample is to randomize the observations
clean_train <- sample(CleanCorpus(raw_train))
clean_train_type <- unlist(meta(clean_train, tag = "class"))
attributes(clean_train_type) <- NULL
dtm_train <- DocumentTermMatrix(clean_train,
                                control = list(dictionary = freq_terms))
dtm_train
## <<DocumentTermMatrix (documents: 1943, terms: 273)>>
## Non-/sparse entries: 37044/493395
## Sparsity           : 93%
## Maximal term length: 20
## Weighting          : term frequency (tf)

Compare the above with the sparsity of the cleaned training corpus without the limiting dictionary:

dtm_train_S <- DocumentTermMatrix(clean_train)
dtm_train_S
## <<DocumentTermMatrix (documents: 1943, terms: 18284)>>
## Non-/sparse entries: 105872/35419940
## Sparsity           : 100%
## Maximal term length: 441
## Weighting          : term frequency (tf)

Building the Validation Set

clean_val <- sample(CleanCorpus(raw_val))
clean_val_type <- unlist(meta(clean_val, tag = "class"))
attributes(clean_val_type) <- NULL
dtm_val <- DocumentTermMatrix(clean_val,
                              control = list(dictionary = freq_terms))

Building the Testing Set

clean_test <- sample(CleanCorpus(raw_test))
clean_test_type <- unlist(meta(clean_test, tag = "class"))
attributes(clean_test_type) <- NULL
dtm_test <- DocumentTermMatrix(clean_test,
                              control = list(dictionary = freq_terms))

Last step

The caret package requires its input to be a numeric matrix. As the DTM is a special form of sparse matrix, we need to convert it to something caret understands. The response vector must be a factor for classification, which is why all three clean_x_type vectors were created as factors.

train_m <- as.matrix(dtm_train)
clean_train_type <- factor(clean_train_type, levels = c("spam", "ham"))
val_m <- as.matrix(dtm_val)
clean_val_type <- factor(clean_val_type, levels = c("spam", "ham"))
test_m <- as.matrix(dtm_test)
clean_test_type <- factor(clean_test_type, levels = c("spam", "ham"))

Train Models

Overview

Now we can train the models. The process will generally follow the following path:

  1. Select a model family (logistic regression, random forest, etc.)
  2. Use the caret package on the training set to pick “best” model given the supplied control, pre-processing, or other [hyper-]parameters. This may include some level of validation
  3. Switch the hyper-parameters, train again, and compare using validation set
  4. Select “best” model from family
  5. Repeat with other families
  6. Compare performance of final selections using testing/holdout set
  7. Take a well-deserved vacation

As the caret package serves as an umbrella for over 230 model types living in different packages, we may select a less-sophisticated version of a family if it reduces code complexity and migraine propensity. Forgive us as well if we don’t explain every family and every selection. Below we create the model matrices which will be passed to caret.

Experimentation was done with many of the tuning parameters. However, most increases in accuracy came at an inordinate expense of time. Therefore, for the purposes of this exercise, many of the more advantageous options will be limited. For example, cross-validation will be limited to single-pass ten-fold. In production, one should be more vigorous, of course.

Optimization Metric

Usually, AUC, a function of ROC, is used for classification problems. However, for imbalanced data sets it is suggested to use one of precision, recall, or F1 instead. See here, here, or here for examples.

In our case, the data set is imbalanced, and the cost of a false positive (classifying ham as spam) is greater than a false negative. Originally, we selected precision as the metric, as hitting the “junk” button for something in your inbox is less annoying than having your boss’s email sit in your junk folder.

However, as we trained models, we found some fascinating results. In one of the random forest models, the algorithm found a better model with one less false positive, at the expense of 61 more false negatives. Therefore, we decided to redo the tests using the balanced F1 as the optimization metric.

Logistic Regression

This is the classic good-old logistic regression in R. There are no hyper/tuning parameters, so the only comparison can be between the method of cross-validation.

# 10-fold CV
tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10L, classProbs = TRUE,
                        summaryFunction = prSummary)
LogR1 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "glm",
              family = "binomial", trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", model=TRUE)
LogR1
## Generalized Linear Model 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1748, 1749, 1748, 1750, 1749, 1749, ... 
## Resampling results:
## 
##   AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##   NaN  0.832728   0.8845135  0.8512476
LogR1v <- predict(LogR1, val_m)
confusionMatrix(LogR1v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  299  50
##       ham    53 545
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.8912          
##                  95% CI : (0.8696, 0.9104)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : <2e-16          
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.7667          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.8438          
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.8567          
##                  Recall : 0.8494          
##                      F1 : 0.8531          
##              Prevalence : 0.3717          
##          Detection Rate : 0.3157          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3685          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.8827          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 
# Monte-Carlo Cross validation using 75/25 and 5 iterations
tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "LGOCV", number = 10L, p = 0.75,
                        classProbs = TRUE, summaryFunction = prSummary)
LogR2 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "glm",
              family = "binomial", trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", model=TRUE)
LogR2
## Generalized Linear Model 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Repeated Train/Test Splits Estimated (10 reps, 75%) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1458, 1458, 1458, 1458, 1458, 1458, ... 
## Resampling results:
## 
##   AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##   NaN  0.8312224  0.8450867  0.8355922
LogR2v <- predict(LogR2, val_m)
confusionMatrix(LogR2v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  299  50
##       ham    53 545
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.8912          
##                  95% CI : (0.8696, 0.9104)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : <2e-16          
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.7667          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.8438          
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.8567          
##                  Recall : 0.8494          
##                      F1 : 0.8531          
##              Prevalence : 0.3717          
##          Detection Rate : 0.3157          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3685          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.8827          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

Both versions performed the same on the validation set. As the first has a slightly better F-score, we will select that one.

Feature importance

Which terms had the most influence on ham/spam classification using Logistic Regression?

# estimate variable importance
importance <- varImp(LogR2)
# summarize importance
print(importance)
## glm variable importance
## 
##   only 20 most important variables shown (out of 273)
## 
##          Overall
## compani 100.0000
## new      58.5875
## like     36.8953
## subject  36.8953
## phone     0.3419
## list      0.3171
## lot       0.2861
## news      0.2845
## look      0.2753
## world     0.2709
## got       0.2641
## work      0.2596
## make      0.2414
## want      0.2363
## welcom    0.2314
## come      0.2077
## system    0.2050
## version   0.1977
## anoth     0.1934
## point     0.1823

Random Forest

The ranger package is used as the random forest engine due to its being optimized for higher dimensions.

tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10L, classProbs = TRUE,
                        summaryFunction = prSummary)
RF1 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = 'ranger', importance = 'impurity',
             trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", tuneLength = 5L)
RF1
## Random Forest 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1748, 1748, 1749, 1749, 1748, 1749, ... 
## Resampling results across tuning parameters:
## 
##   mtry  splitrule   AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##     2   gini        NaN  0.9788718  0.8013665  0.8809090
##     2   extratrees  NaN  0.9817402  0.7768944  0.8670101
##    69   gini        NaN  0.9086450  0.8978468  0.9026036
##    69   extratrees  NaN  0.9124903  0.9050311  0.9079492
##   137   gini        NaN  0.8978854  0.8935818  0.8951045
##   137   extratrees  NaN  0.9057635  0.9007660  0.9024300
##   205   gini        NaN  0.8884988  0.8964596  0.8917135
##   205   extratrees  NaN  0.8960593  0.8993168  0.8969889
##   273   gini        NaN  0.8820752  0.8950104  0.8877914
##   273   extratrees  NaN  0.8965541  0.9007660  0.8978900
## 
## Tuning parameter 'min.node.size' was held constant at a value of 1
## F was used to select the optimal model using the largest value.
## The final values used for the model were mtry = 69, splitrule =
##  extratrees and min.node.size = 1.
RF1v <- predict(RF1, newdata=val_m)
confusionMatrix(RF1v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  313  28
##       ham    39 567
##                                          
##                Accuracy : 0.9293         
##                  95% CI : (0.911, 0.9448)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283         
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : <2e-16         
##                                          
##                   Kappa : 0.8476         
##                                          
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.2218         
##                                          
##               Precision : 0.9179         
##                  Recall : 0.8892         
##                      F1 : 0.9033         
##              Prevalence : 0.3717         
##          Detection Rate : 0.3305         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3601         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9211         
##                                          
##        'Positive' Class : spam           
## 

Let’s do a bit wider search among tuning parameters.

rf_grid <- expand.grid(mtry = seq(8, 48, 4),
                       splitrule = c('gini', 'extratrees'),
                       min.node.size = c(1L, 10L))
RF2 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = 'ranger', importance = 'impurity',
             trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", tuneGrid = rf_grid)
RF2
## Random Forest 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1748, 1749, 1749, 1749, 1748, 1749, ... 
## Resampling results across tuning parameters:
## 
##   mtry  splitrule   min.node.size  AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##    8    gini         1             NaN  0.9560836  0.8805797  0.9160525
##    8    gini        10             NaN  0.9515864  0.8791304  0.9131949
##    8    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9721391  0.8834576  0.9251636
##    8    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9705734  0.8790476  0.9218051
##   12    gini         1             NaN  0.9401049  0.8834783  0.9102516
##   12    gini        10             NaN  0.9506126  0.8878054  0.9174724
##   12    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9577979  0.8906211  0.9224052
##   12    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9578437  0.8878054  0.9207585
##   16    gini         1             NaN  0.9357096  0.8849068  0.9091086
##   16    gini        10             NaN  0.9372691  0.8849068  0.9098376
##   16    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9431809  0.8906418  0.9155021
##   16    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9534962  0.8892754  0.9195344
##   20    gini         1             NaN  0.9292837  0.8920911  0.9098575
##   20    gini        10             NaN  0.9307878  0.8892340  0.9090334
##   20    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9448985  0.8921325  0.9171801
##   20    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9451897  0.8935818  0.9179955
##   24    gini         1             NaN  0.9251642  0.8934990  0.9086789
##   24    gini        10             NaN  0.9280280  0.8877433  0.9069372
##   24    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9380455  0.8921325  0.9138337
##   24    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9427532  0.8935404  0.9166868
##   28    gini         1             NaN  0.9154855  0.8920911  0.9032447
##   28    gini        10             NaN  0.9210724  0.8920704  0.9059209
##   28    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9330126  0.9007453  0.9159902
##   28    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9398179  0.8935611  0.9153825
##   32    gini         1             NaN  0.9146543  0.8949482  0.9042545
##   32    gini        10             NaN  0.9172048  0.8920497  0.9039964
##   32    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9338833  0.8964182  0.9142360
##   32    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9380676  0.8906625  0.9131151
##   36    gini         1             NaN  0.9156898  0.8963561  0.9055929
##   36    gini        10             NaN  0.9171576  0.8906211  0.9032405
##   36    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9300194  0.9050311  0.9169262
##   36    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9374517  0.8992754  0.9173512
##   40    gini         1             NaN  0.9054875  0.8963561  0.9004662
##   40    gini        10             NaN  0.9171086  0.8934990  0.9047672
##   40    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9237390  0.8949689  0.9087357
##   40    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9341807  0.8963975  0.9142381
##   44    gini         1             NaN  0.9105831  0.8949275  0.9022434
##   44    gini        10             NaN  0.9127428  0.8920704  0.9019550
##   44    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9256656  0.9007453  0.9126551
##   44    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9324693  0.8964182  0.9136360
##   48    gini         1             NaN  0.9089833  0.8949275  0.9015684
##   48    gini        10             NaN  0.9110386  0.8963768  0.9031351
##   48    extratrees   1             NaN  0.9256536  0.9007039  0.9125853
##   48    extratrees  10             NaN  0.9264533  0.8920911  0.9085885
## 
## F was used to select the optimal model using the largest value.
## The final values used for the model were mtry = 8, splitrule =
##  extratrees and min.node.size = 1.
RF2v <- predict(RF2, val_m)
confusionMatrix(RF2v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  305  10
##       ham    47 585
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.9398          
##                  95% CI : (0.9227, 0.9541)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : < 2.2e-16       
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.8683          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 1.858e-06       
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.9683          
##                  Recall : 0.8665          
##                      F1 : 0.9145          
##              Prevalence : 0.3717          
##          Detection Rate : 0.3221          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3326          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9248          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

Interestingly, the first model performed better on the validation set despite performing more poorly on the training set. Possibly an example of overfitting.

Feature importance

Which terms had the most influence on ham/spam classification using Random Forest?

# estimate variable importance
importance <- varImp(RF2)
# summarize importance
print(importance)
## ranger variable importance
## 
##   only 20 most important variables shown (out of 273)
## 
##                      Overall
## click                 100.00
## url                    87.88
## wrote                  46.93
## remov                  32.66
## free                   28.51
## visit                  27.96
## receiv                 22.60
## contenttransferencod   20.69
## email                  18.88
## offer                  18.86
## guarante               18.61
## credit                 18.52
## inform                 15.03
## contenttyp             13.90
## use                    13.55
## repli                  13.23
## fill                   12.23
## onlin                  11.90
## unsubscrib             11.46
## sep                    10.97

Naive Bayes

tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10L, classProbs = TRUE,
                        summaryFunction = prSummary)
NB1 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "nb",
             trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F")
NB1
## Naive Bayes 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1748, 1748, 1748, 1750, 1749, 1749, ... 
## Resampling results across tuning parameters:
## 
##   usekernel  AUC  Precision  Recall      F         
##   FALSE      NaN        NaN         NaN         NaN
##    TRUE      NaN  0.9466667  0.03451346  0.06611488
## 
## Tuning parameter 'fL' was held constant at a value of 0
## Tuning
##  parameter 'adjust' was held constant at a value of 1
## F was used to select the optimal model using the largest value.
## The final values used for the model were fL = 0, usekernel = TRUE
##  and adjust = 1.
NB1v <- predict(NB1, val_m)
confusionMatrix(NB1v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam   14   0
##       ham   338 595
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.6431          
##                  95% CI : (0.6116, 0.6736)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 0.1821          
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.0495          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : <2e-16          
##                                           
##               Precision : 1.00000         
##                  Recall : 0.03977         
##                      F1 : 0.07650         
##              Prevalence : 0.37170         
##          Detection Rate : 0.01478         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.01478         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.51989         
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

This is an awfully performing model. Naive Bayes is known to be very sensitive to class imbalances. Let’s implement up-sampling and a wider search.

tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10L, classProbs = TRUE,
                        summaryFunction = prSummary, sampling = 'up')
nb_grid <- expand.grid(usekernel = TRUE,
                       fL = seq(0.25, 0.75, 0.05),
                       adjust = 1)
NB2 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "nb",
             trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", tuneGrid = nb_grid)
NB2
## Naive Bayes 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1749, 1748, 1749, 1749, 1748, 1748, ... 
## Addtional sampling using up-sampling
## 
## Resampling results across tuning parameters:
## 
##   fL    AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##   0.25  NaN  0.9541667  0.1166046  0.2037892
##   0.30  NaN  0.9666667  0.1137267  0.1994249
##   0.35  NaN  0.9088578  0.1051760  0.1841190
##   0.40  NaN  0.9333333  0.1081366  0.1881287
##   0.45  NaN  0.9394737  0.1194824  0.2057451
##   0.50  NaN  0.9155043  0.1412008  0.2309263
##   0.55  NaN  0.9173993  0.1238716  0.2092754
##   0.60  NaN  0.9375000  0.1109524  0.1908032
##   0.65  NaN  0.9416667  0.1153209  0.2004130
##   0.70  NaN  0.9266667  0.1123395  0.1935542
##   0.75  NaN  0.9604167  0.1166874  0.2039317
## 
## Tuning parameter 'usekernel' was held constant at a value of TRUE
## 
## Tuning parameter 'adjust' was held constant at a value of 1
## F was used to select the optimal model using the largest value.
## The final values used for the model were fL = 0.5, usekernel = TRUE
##  and adjust = 1.
NB2v <- predict(NB2, val_m)
confusionMatrix(NB2v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam   23   0
##       ham   329 595
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.6526          
##                  95% CI : (0.6213, 0.6829)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 0.06465         
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.0808          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : < 2e-16         
##                                           
##               Precision : 1.00000         
##                  Recall : 0.06534         
##                      F1 : 0.12267         
##              Prevalence : 0.37170         
##          Detection Rate : 0.02429         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.02429         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.53267         
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

Results are still miserable. Naive Bayes also assumes Independence between all features - with engligh text, words/terms are likely to have correlations thus violating the core assumption of Naive Bayes. Since our current terms also some leakage of HTML tags and attributes, there are going to be correlations between terms we have selected. Naive Bayes would probably perform significantly better if we stipped all HTML terms and made a pass on reducing features by looking for correlations.

Feature importance

Which terms had the most influence on ham/spam classification using Naive Bayes?

# estimate variable importance
importance <- varImp(NB2)
# summarize importance
print(importance)
## ROC curve variable importance
## 
##   only 20 most important variables shown (out of 273)
## 
##                      Importance
## click                    100.00
## email                     89.99
## wrote                     74.99
## remov                     71.61
## receiv                    68.86
## free                      61.91
## will                      58.12
## url                       57.92
## inform                    50.18
## busi                      44.29
## address                   39.52
## offer                     39.47
## money                     34.79
## repli                     34.78
## contenttransferencod      33.53
## month                     31.43
## now                       31.20
## contenttyp                30.01
## send                      29.89
## form                      29.85

Neural Network

tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10L, classProbs = TRUE,
                        summaryFunction = prSummary)

NN1 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "nnet", trace = FALSE, 
             trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", tuneLength=5L, maxit = 250L)
NN1
## Neural Network 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1748, 1749, 1750, 1749, 1748, 1749, ... 
## Resampling results across tuning parameters:
## 
##   size  decay  AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##   1     0e+00  NaN  0.8561658  0.8735197  0.8605048
##   1     1e-04  NaN  0.8755199  0.8721118  0.8711027
##   1     1e-03  NaN  0.8923953  0.8778468  0.8832447
##   1     1e-02  NaN  0.8916082  0.8705590  0.8800400
##   1     1e-01  NaN  0.9033437  0.8720704  0.8857136
##   3     0e+00  NaN  0.8804541  0.8835818  0.8807774
##   3     1e-04  NaN  0.8903736  0.8719876  0.8801829
##   3     1e-03  NaN  0.8993386  0.8706418  0.8829952
##   3     1e-02  NaN  0.9003442  0.8619462  0.8795136
##   3     1e-01  NaN  0.9075439  0.8806625  0.8926490
##   5     0e+00  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   5     1e-04  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   5     1e-03  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   5     1e-02  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   5     1e-01  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   7     0e+00  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   7     1e-04  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   7     1e-03  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   7     1e-02  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   7     1e-01  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   9     0e+00  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   9     1e-04  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   9     1e-03  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   9     1e-02  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
##   9     1e-01  NaN        NaN        NaN        NaN
## 
## F was used to select the optimal model using the largest value.
## The final values used for the model were size = 3 and decay = 0.1.
NN1v <- predict(NN1, val_m)
confusionMatrix(NN1v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  312  30
##       ham    40 565
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.9261          
##                  95% CI : (0.9075, 0.9419)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : <2e-16          
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.8408          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.2821          
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.9123          
##                  Recall : 0.8864          
##                      F1 : 0.8991          
##              Prevalence : 0.3717          
##          Detection Rate : 0.3295          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3611          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9180          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

Some light tuning:

nn_grid <- expand.grid(size = 1L, decay = c(0.99, seq(0.95, 0.05, -0.05), 0.01))
NN2 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "nnet", trace = FALSE,
             trControl = tr_ctrl, metric = "F", tuneGrid = nn_grid,
             maxit = 250L)
NN2
## Neural Network 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1749, 1749, 1748, 1749, 1749, 1748, ... 
## Resampling results across tuning parameters:
## 
##   decay  AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##   0.01   NaN  0.8901851  0.8848447  0.8850931
##   0.05   NaN  0.8907265  0.8805383  0.8841007
##   0.10   NaN  0.9118240  0.8790683  0.8941087
##   0.15   NaN  0.9102083  0.8747826  0.8911191
##   0.20   NaN  0.9105165  0.8805590  0.8942741
##   0.25   NaN  0.9156290  0.8819462  0.8976071
##   0.30   NaN  0.9207427  0.8805176  0.8994246
##   0.35   NaN  0.9187761  0.8848861  0.9005812
##   0.40   NaN  0.9245709  0.8863147  0.9039597
##   0.45   NaN  0.9189044  0.8848654  0.9004538
##   0.50   NaN  0.9265699  0.8819876  0.9028062
##   0.55   NaN  0.9243469  0.8848654  0.9030637
##   0.60   NaN  0.9254402  0.8848654  0.9037857
##   0.65   NaN  0.9227472  0.8849068  0.9023392
##   0.70   NaN  0.9284551  0.8877640  0.9066254
##   0.75   NaN  0.9293481  0.8820083  0.9041183
##   0.80   NaN  0.9336852  0.8848861  0.9076063
##   0.85   NaN  0.9351193  0.8848861  0.9082099
##   0.90   NaN  0.9365496  0.8877847  0.9104182
##   0.95   NaN  0.9388448  0.8834576  0.9093721
##   0.99   NaN  0.9377932  0.8820290  0.9080236
## 
## Tuning parameter 'size' was held constant at a value of 1
## F was used to select the optimal model using the largest value.
## The final values used for the model were size = 1 and decay = 0.9.
NN2v <- predict(NN2, val_m)
confusionMatrix(NN2v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  312  18
##       ham    40 577
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.9388          
##                  95% CI : (0.9215, 0.9532)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : < 2.2e-16       
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.8672          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.005826        
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.9455          
##                  Recall : 0.8864          
##                      F1 : 0.9150          
##              Prevalence : 0.3717          
##          Detection Rate : 0.3295          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3485          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9281          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

Both models performed the same on the validation set. As the second performed better on the training set too, we will use it.

Feature importance

Which terms had the most influence on ham/spam classification using a Neural Network?

# estimate variable importance
importance <- varImp(NN2)
# summarize importance
print(importance)
## nnet variable importance
## 
##   only 20 most important variables shown (out of 273)
## 
##                      Overall
## url                   100.00
## click                  80.71
## wrote                  67.61
## write                  41.78
## use                    39.23
## two                    38.81
## spam                   38.66
## visit                  37.63
## guarante               36.31
## someth                 35.82
## minut                  35.67
## file                   35.16
## origin                 34.74
## price                  34.09
## home                   33.78
## credit                 33.53
## old                    33.21
## contenttransferencod   33.13
## satalk                 33.10
## seem                   32.31

Gradient Boosted Machines

tr_ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10L, classProbs = TRUE,
                        summaryFunction = prSummary)
GBM1 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "gbm", verbose = FALSE,
              trControl = tr_ctrl, tuneLength = 5L, metric = "F")
GBM1v <- predict(GBM1, val_m)
confusionMatrix(GBM1v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  307  16
##       ham    45 579
##                                          
##                Accuracy : 0.9356         
##                  95% CI : (0.918, 0.9504)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283         
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : < 2.2e-16      
##                                          
##                   Kappa : 0.8597         
##                                          
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.000337       
##                                          
##               Precision : 0.9505         
##                  Recall : 0.8722         
##                      F1 : 0.9096         
##              Prevalence : 0.3717         
##          Detection Rate : 0.3242         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3411         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9226         
##                                          
##        'Positive' Class : spam           
## 

This model looks really good. Let’s throw a little extra fine-tuning in. After running a wide-scale grid, the best option is selected below, so that the entire grid doesn’t have to rerun every time.

gbm_grid <- expand.grid(n.trees = 400L,
                     interaction.depth = 7L,
                     shrinkage = 0.1,
                     n.minobsinnode = 10L)
GBM2 <- train(x = train_m, y = clean_train_type, method = "gbm", verbose = FALSE,
              trControl = tr_ctrl, tuneGrid = gbm_grid, metric = "F")
GBM2
## Stochastic Gradient Boosting 
## 
## 1943 samples
##  273 predictor
##    2 classes: 'spam', 'ham' 
## 
## No pre-processing
## Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold) 
## Summary of sample sizes: 1748, 1749, 1749, 1749, 1749, 1748, ... 
## Resampling results:
## 
##   AUC  Precision  Recall     F        
##   NaN  0.9312035  0.8934783  0.9114161
## 
## Tuning parameter 'n.trees' was held constant at a value of 400
##  7
## Tuning parameter 'shrinkage' was held constant at a value of 0.1
## 
## Tuning parameter 'n.minobsinnode' was held constant at a value of 10
GBM2v <- predict(GBM2, val_m)
confusionMatrix(GBM2v, clean_val_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  313  19
##       ham    39 576
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.9388          
##                  95% CI : (0.9215, 0.9532)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6283          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : <2e-16          
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.8673          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.0126          
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.9428          
##                  Recall : 0.8892          
##                      F1 : 0.9152          
##              Prevalence : 0.3717          
##          Detection Rate : 0.3305          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3506          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9286          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

The second model performed better.

Feature importance

Which terms had the most influence on ham/spam classification using a Gradient Boosted Machines?

# estimate variable importance
summary(GBM2)

##                                       var      rel.inf
## click                               click 2.161020e+01
## wrote                               wrote 7.605447e+00
## contenttransferencod contenttransferencod 5.853304e+00
## url                                   url 5.754147e+00
## email                               email 4.467909e+00
## free                                 free 4.467148e+00
## credit                             credit 3.519458e+00
## use                                   use 2.539157e+00
## inform                             inform 2.489711e+00
## remov                               remov 2.211366e+00
## visit                               visit 2.100716e+00
## tri                                   tri 1.860417e+00
## will                                 will 1.572677e+00
## receiv                             receiv 1.572550e+00
## money                               money 1.503986e+00
## repli                               repli 1.471839e+00
## guarante                         guarante 1.361171e+00
## satalk                             satalk 1.300317e+00
## file                                 file 1.038014e+00
## think                               think 9.985085e-01
## spam                                 spam 9.400972e-01
## write                               write 9.023706e-01
## month                               month 8.311448e-01
## price                               price 7.122357e-01
## just                                 just 6.271718e-01
## run                                   run 6.203517e-01
## onlin                               onlin 6.137794e-01
## life                                 life 6.110274e-01
## origin                             origin 6.020475e-01
## compani                           compani 6.014813e-01
## home                                 home 5.901168e-01
## offer                               offer 5.830631e-01
## said                                 said 5.816172e-01
## seem                                 seem 5.670010e-01
## post                                 post 5.120565e-01
## someth                             someth 4.929206e-01
## set                                   set 4.652284e-01
## two                                   two 4.232338e-01
## messag                             messag 4.145107e-01
## old                                   old 3.606918e-01
## busi                                 busi 3.580901e-01
## base                                 base 3.271115e-01
## minut                               minut 3.242680e-01
## say                                   say 3.127809e-01
## date                                 date 3.071246e-01
## linux                               linux 2.945055e-01
## list                                 list 2.847406e-01
## problem                           problem 2.783897e-01
## like                                 like 2.603574e-01
## contact                           contact 2.534431e-01
## internet                         internet 2.439998e-01
## mail                                 mail 2.239890e-01
## can                                   can 2.170459e-01
## market                             market 2.152287e-01
## group                               group 2.129763e-01
## ask                                   ask 1.942057e-01
## page                                 page 1.912279e-01
## first                               first 1.798282e-01
## get                                   get 1.742528e-01
## know                                 know 1.637295e-01
## form                                 form 1.606384e-01
## still                               still 1.548644e-01
## well                                 well 1.511234e-01
## sure                                 sure 1.493177e-01
## increas                           increas 1.490209e-01
## world                               world 1.460991e-01
## user                                 user 1.460639e-01
## big                                   big 1.452180e-01
## also                                 also 1.437661e-01
## anyth                               anyth 1.398074e-01
## order                               order 1.396753e-01
## cours                               cours 1.352443e-01
## want                                 want 1.318634e-01
## els                                   els 1.284044e-01
## one                                   one 1.279265e-01
## help                                 help 1.272265e-01
## time                                 time 1.262518e-01
## bit                                   bit 1.253737e-01
## send                                 send 1.246751e-01
## wed                                   wed 1.217600e-01
## peopl                               peopl 1.214480e-01
## comput                             comput 1.191559e-01
## bill                                 bill 1.179737e-01
## provid                             provid 1.176690e-01
## sponsor                           sponsor 1.126738e-01
## per                                   per 1.099541e-01
## sinc                                 sinc 1.066307e-01
## new                                   new 1.066102e-01
## test                                 test 1.024831e-01
## result                             result 1.018704e-01
## anyon                               anyon 9.788953e-02
## phone                               phone 9.235779e-02
## got                                   got 9.101675e-02
## start                               start 8.667044e-02
## fix                                   fix 8.482784e-02
## futur                               futur 8.133557e-02
## end                                   end 7.921247e-02
## look                                 look 7.707685e-02
## welcom                             welcom 7.643967e-02
## place                               place 7.452474e-02
## differ                             differ 7.254353e-02
## now                                   now 7.049492e-02
## window                             window 6.760719e-02
## info                                 info 6.740470e-02
## find                                 find 6.701832e-02
## friend                             friend 6.688898e-02
## multipart                       multipart 6.494659e-02
## anoth                               anoth 6.448710e-02
## servic                             servic 6.240642e-02
## day                                   day 6.110203e-02
## high                                 high 6.087286e-02
## server                             server 6.019775e-02
## show                                 show 5.851082e-02
## subject                           subject 5.774622e-02
## special                           special 5.629601e-02
## site                                 site 5.081442e-02
## live                                 live 5.065205e-02
## make                                 make 4.785880e-02
## come                                 come 4.521090e-02
## network                           network 4.467296e-02
## much                                 much 4.426474e-02
## septemb                           septemb 4.316123e-02
## found                               found 4.167335e-02
## idea                                 idea 4.141606e-02
## work                                 work 4.045378e-02
## thank                               thank 3.962084e-02
## program                           program 3.946947e-02
## around                             around 3.886292e-02
## import                             import 3.808581e-02
## read                                 read 3.799456e-02
## system                             system 3.789746e-02
## million                           million 3.788443e-02
## call                                 call 3.567298e-02
## name                                 name 3.445449e-02
## noth                                 noth 3.418957e-02
## may                                   may 3.295285e-02
## thing                               thing 3.089898e-02
## talk                                 talk 3.051746e-02
## case                                 case 2.996170e-02
## regard                             regard 2.959185e-02
## keep                                 keep 2.944816e-02
## textplain                       textplain 2.931279e-02
## seen                                 seen 2.910696e-02
## see                                   see 2.809688e-02
## stuff                               stuff 2.793521e-02
## back                                 back 2.746908e-02
## bythinkgeek                   bythinkgeek 2.734656e-02
## account                           account 2.673125e-02
## part                                 part 2.644753e-02
## possibl                           possibl 2.617820e-02
## give                                 give 2.613689e-02
## pay                                   pay 2.521518e-02
## version                           version 2.438420e-02
## need                                 need 2.377230e-02
## someon                             someon 2.337084e-02
## sfnet                               sfnet 2.230258e-02
## news                                 news 2.219106e-02
## question                         question 2.206843e-02
## communic                         communic 1.964057e-02
## forward                           forward 1.922125e-02
## mean                                 mean 1.917130e-02
## let                                   let 1.867871e-02
## report                             report 1.828012e-02
## today                               today 1.805068e-02
## take                                 take 1.797569e-02
## number                             number 1.782216e-02
## instal                             instal 1.781596e-02
## custom                             custom 1.695841e-02
## process                           process 1.677739e-02
## real                                 real 1.665066e-02
## easi                                 easi 1.652082e-02
## power                               power 1.647496e-02
## best                                 best 1.517644e-02
## week                                 week 1.403640e-02
## mayb                                 mayb 1.401136e-02
## heaven                             heaven 1.378781e-02
## point                               point 1.340291e-02
## sell                                 sell 1.329788e-02
## data                                 data 1.164278e-02
## packag                             packag 1.056673e-02
## mani                                 mani 1.024633e-02
## ever                                 ever 9.829212e-03
## better                             better 9.589975e-03
## simpli                             simpli 9.007904e-03
## rate                                 rate 8.473232e-03
## person                             person 8.184903e-03
## year                                 year 7.749456e-03
## next                                 next 6.107026e-03
## issu                                 issu 5.850099e-03
## put                                   put 5.577113e-03
## wait                                 wait 4.659619e-03
## code                                 code 4.548406e-03
## last                                 last 4.533431e-03
## web                                   web 4.368925e-03
## word                                 word 4.303451e-03
## build                               build 3.927266e-03
## realli                             realli 3.865272e-03
## contenttyp                     contenttyp 3.644155e-03
## product                           product 3.050829e-03
## interest                         interest 2.844313e-03
## save                                 save 2.808408e-03
## direct                             direct 2.790693e-03
## includ                             includ 2.428964e-03
## good                                 good 2.324983e-03
## lot                                   lot 2.007823e-03
## kind                                 kind 1.987814e-03
## geek                                 geek 1.386487e-03
## error                               error 1.213979e-03
## right                               right 1.170147e-03
## yes                                   yes 9.860478e-04
## releas                             releas 6.735418e-04
## abl                                   abl 0.000000e+00
## access                             access 0.000000e+00
## actual                             actual 0.000000e+00
## add                                   add 0.000000e+00
## address                           address 0.000000e+00
## allow                               allow 0.000000e+00
## alway                               alway 0.000000e+00
## aug                                   aug 0.000000e+00
## avail                               avail 0.000000e+00
## bad                                   bad 0.000000e+00
## chang                               chang 0.000000e+00
## check                               check 0.000000e+00
## complet                           complet 0.000000e+00
## cost                                 cost 0.000000e+00
## current                           current 0.000000e+00
## done                                 done 0.000000e+00
## either                             either 0.000000e+00
## enough                             enough 0.000000e+00
## even                                 even 0.000000e+00
## everi                               everi 0.000000e+00
## everyth                           everyth 0.000000e+00
## fact                                 fact 0.000000e+00
## feel                                 feel 0.000000e+00
## fill                                 fill 0.000000e+00
## follow                             follow 0.000000e+00
## format                             format 0.000000e+00
## full                                 full 0.000000e+00
## great                               great 0.000000e+00
## happen                             happen 0.000000e+00
## hour                                 hour 0.000000e+00
## howev                               howev 0.000000e+00
## instead                           instead 0.000000e+00
## least                               least 0.000000e+00
## less                                 less 0.000000e+00
## line                                 line 0.000000e+00
## link                                 link 0.000000e+00
## long                                 long 0.000000e+00
## made                                 made 0.000000e+00
## manag                               manag 0.000000e+00
## mime                                 mime 0.000000e+00
## must                                 must 0.000000e+00
## never                               never 0.000000e+00
## note                                 note 0.000000e+00
## probabl                           probabl 0.000000e+00
## quick                               quick 0.000000e+00
## reason                             reason 0.000000e+00
## relat                               relat 0.000000e+00
## requir                             requir 0.000000e+00
## sent                                 sent 0.000000e+00
## sep                                   sep 0.000000e+00
## softwar                           softwar 0.000000e+00
## sourc                               sourc 0.000000e+00
## state                               state 0.000000e+00
## support                           support 0.000000e+00
## tell                                 tell 0.000000e+00
## though                             though 0.000000e+00
## type                                 type 0.000000e+00
## unsubscrib                     unsubscrib 0.000000e+00
## way                                   way 0.000000e+00
## wish                                 wish 0.000000e+00
## within                             within 0.000000e+00
## without                           without 0.000000e+00

Other models

With over 230 possible models, there are many more options to train, like XGBoost, Neural Networks, Bayesian Regression, Support Vector Machines, etc. We don’t need to exhaust the possibilities here.

Test Models

The best models in the above categories will now be compared against the testing/holdout set:

LogRt <- predict(LogR1, test_m)
RFt <- predict(RF1, newdata=test_m)
NNt <- predict(NN2, test_m)
NBt <- predict(NB2, test_m) # For laughs
GBMt <- predict(GBM2, test_m)
confusionMatrix(LogRt, clean_test_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  292  60
##       ham    57 597
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.8837          
##                  95% CI : (0.8623, 0.9029)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6531          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : <2e-16          
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.7439          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.8533          
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.8295          
##                  Recall : 0.8367          
##                      F1 : 0.8331          
##              Prevalence : 0.3469          
##          Detection Rate : 0.2903          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3499          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.8727          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 
confusionMatrix(RFt, clean_test_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  302  20
##       ham    47 637
##                                          
##                Accuracy : 0.9334         
##                  95% CI : (0.9162, 0.948)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6531         
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : < 2.2e-16      
##                                          
##                   Kappa : 0.8503         
##                                          
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.001491       
##                                          
##               Precision : 0.9379         
##                  Recall : 0.8653         
##                      F1 : 0.9001         
##              Prevalence : 0.3469         
##          Detection Rate : 0.3002         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3201         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9174         
##                                          
##        'Positive' Class : spam           
## 
confusionMatrix(NNt, clean_test_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  302  20
##       ham    47 637
##                                          
##                Accuracy : 0.9334         
##                  95% CI : (0.9162, 0.948)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6531         
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : < 2.2e-16      
##                                          
##                   Kappa : 0.8503         
##                                          
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 0.001491       
##                                          
##               Precision : 0.9379         
##                  Recall : 0.8653         
##                      F1 : 0.9001         
##              Prevalence : 0.3469         
##          Detection Rate : 0.3002         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3201         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9174         
##                                          
##        'Positive' Class : spam           
## 
confusionMatrix(NBt, clean_test_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam   34   3
##       ham   315 654
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.6839          
##                  95% CI : (0.6542, 0.7126)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6531          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 0.02111         
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.1175          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : < 2e-16         
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.91892         
##                  Recall : 0.09742         
##                      F1 : 0.17617         
##              Prevalence : 0.34692         
##          Detection Rate : 0.03380         
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.03678         
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.54643         
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 
confusionMatrix(GBMt, clean_test_type, mode = "prec_recall", positive = "spam")
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
## 
##           Reference
## Prediction spam ham
##       spam  300   9
##       ham    49 648
##                                           
##                Accuracy : 0.9423          
##                  95% CI : (0.9261, 0.9559)
##     No Information Rate : 0.6531          
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : < 2.2e-16       
##                                           
##                   Kappa : 0.8693          
##                                           
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : 3.04e-07        
##                                           
##               Precision : 0.9709          
##                  Recall : 0.8596          
##                      F1 : 0.9119          
##              Prevalence : 0.3469          
##          Detection Rate : 0.2982          
##    Detection Prevalence : 0.3072          
##       Balanced Accuracy : 0.9230          
##                                           
##        'Positive' Class : spam            
## 

From these models, while the logistic had no false negatives—a recall of 1—it did so by coding 57 good emails as spam. The remaining models all did quite well, but the winner is the random forest model, with the highest F-score and fewest miscategorized emails of any type.

Discussion

With our initial pass on this project, we did NOT remove HTML from email messages and as a consequence, HTML tags and attribute names and values became “words” or “terms” used by our models to help resolve SPAM vs HAM. Interestingly, our models performed significantly better and the HTML terms and attribute ended up being the most important features used as criteria by models. After seeing this, we modified our email cleaning to actively remove HTML markup. Our model perform dropped ~10% across all models without HTML. This suggests that the very presense of HTML markup in the corpus is a feature associated with and predictive of SPAM.

The email corpus is from the early 2000’s at a time when most email clients did NOT use HTML markup by default, so most HAM would NOT have included much if any HTML. SPAM on the other hand often included HTML links and images intended to draw the recipient to a website or email address where they could buy something.

While the presense of HTML was an indicator of SPAM in the early 2000’s, we suspect that models trained with HTML would perform poorly today as most email clients routinely use HTML markup for text formating, shared links and images. For this reason, we chose to remove the HTML and try training a model on only the email text, as that might perform better over time.

Note that whlie we tried to remove HTML markup, when we inspect the terms, we still see some words that look suspiciouly like HTML, for example, “contenttype”. This may suggest some leakage of HTML that we missed during scrubbing.

If you inspect the terms, you may note missing trailing characters. This is not a bug, but rather part of the word stem approach to simplifying the word list by finding similar words. For example, “run”, “running”, “runs”, “runner” all have the same base “run”. The SnowballC package drops the endings so all the variants collapse to the same word root.

If we really wanted to expand this project, some additional features we might include beyond the word list:

  • Possibly add a boolean feature indicating whether the email contained any URL’s
  • Possibly add a boolean feature whether there were any HTML markup in the email
  • Use Correlation matrices to identify auto-correlation between words and remove unnecessary terms.

Since email language and markup changes over time, and spammers are constantly changing their email to get past spam filters, any model built to separate HAM vs SPAM will probably need to be constantly retrained.

Epilogue

sessionInfo()
## R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
## Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas/libblas.so.3
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopenblasp-r0.2.20.so
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=C                 LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=C                  LC_COLLATE=C              
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=C              LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] parallel  stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
## [8] base     
## 
## other attached packages:
##  [1] forcats_0.4.0      stringr_1.4.0      dplyr_0.8.3       
##  [4] purrr_0.3.3        readr_1.3.1        tidyr_1.0.0       
##  [7] tibble_2.1.3       tidyverse_1.2.1    wordcloud_2.6     
## [10] RColorBrewer_1.1-2 caret_6.0-84       ggplot2_3.2.1     
## [13] lattice_0.20-38    SnowballC_0.6.0    tm_0.7-6          
## [16] NLP_0.2-0          doParallel_1.0.15  iterators_1.0.12  
## [19] foreach_1.4.7     
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] colorspace_1.4-1   class_7.3-15       rstudioapi_0.10   
##  [4] prodlim_2019.10.13 lubridate_1.7.4    ranger_0.11.2     
##  [7] xml2_1.2.2         codetools_0.2-16   splines_3.6.1     
## [10] knitr_1.25         zeallot_0.1.0      jsonlite_1.6      
## [13] broom_0.5.2        shiny_1.4.0        compiler_3.6.1    
## [16] httr_1.4.1         backports_1.1.5    assertthat_0.2.1  
## [19] Matrix_1.2-17      fastmap_1.0.1      lazyeval_0.2.2    
## [22] cli_1.1.0          later_1.0.0        htmltools_0.4.0   
## [25] tools_3.6.1        gtable_0.3.0       glue_1.3.1        
## [28] reshape2_1.4.3     Rcpp_1.0.2         slam_0.1-46       
## [31] cellranger_1.1.0   vctrs_0.2.0        nlme_3.1-141      
## [34] timeDate_3043.102  gower_0.2.1        xfun_0.10         
## [37] rvest_0.3.4        mime_0.7           miniUI_0.1.1.1    
## [40] lifecycle_0.1.0    MASS_7.3-51.4      MLmetrics_1.1.1   
## [43] scales_1.0.0       ipred_0.9-9        hms_0.5.2         
## [46] promises_1.1.0     yaml_2.2.0         gridExtra_2.3     
## [49] rpart_4.1-15       stringi_1.4.3      highr_0.8         
## [52] klaR_0.6-14        e1071_1.7-2        lava_1.6.6        
## [55] rlang_0.4.1        pkgconfig_2.0.3    evaluate_0.14     
## [58] recipes_0.1.7      labeling_0.3       tidyselect_0.2.5  
## [61] gbm_2.1.5          plyr_1.8.4         magrittr_1.5      
## [64] R6_2.4.0           generics_0.0.2     combinat_0.0-8    
## [67] pillar_1.4.2       haven_2.1.1        withr_2.1.2       
## [70] survival_2.44-1.1  nnet_7.3-12        modelr_0.1.5      
## [73] crayon_1.3.4       questionr_0.7.0    rmarkdown_1.16    
## [76] grid_3.6.1         readxl_1.3.1       data.table_1.12.6 
## [79] ModelMetrics_1.2.2 digest_0.6.22      xtable_1.8-4      
## [82] httpuv_1.5.2       stats4_3.6.1       munsell_0.5.0
stopCluster(cl)