Browsing by Author "Nachenahalli Bhuthegowda, Bharath Kumar"

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    Methods for Analyzing the Evolution of Email Spam
    (University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Nachenahalli Bhuthegowda, Bharath Kumar; Lowd, Daniel
    Email spam has steadily grown and has become a major problem for users, email service providers, and many other organizations. Many adversarial methods have been proposed to combat spam and various studies have been made on the evolution of email spam, by finding evolution patterns and trends based on historical spam data and by incorporating spam filters. In this thesis, we try to understand the evolution of email spam and how we can build better classifiers that will remain effective against adaptive adversaries like spammers. We compare various methods for analyzing the evolution of spam emails by incorporating spam filters along with a spam dataset. We explore the trends based on the weights of the features learned by the classifiers and the accuracies of the classifiers trained and tested in different settings. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the classifier trained in adversarial settings on synthetic data.