The "spam" concept is diverse: advertisements for products/web
sites, make money fast schemes, chain letters, pornography...
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.
Attribute 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.