A COMPARISON OF MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES: E-MAIL SPAM FILTERING FROM COMBINED SWAHILI AND ENGLISH EMAIL MESSAGES

The speed of technology change is faster now compared to the past ten to fifteen years. It changes the way people live and force them to use the latest devices to match with the speed. In communication perspectives nowadays, use of electronic mail (e-mail) for people who want to communicate with friends, companies or even the universities cannot be avoided. This makes it to be the most targeted by the spammer and hackers and other bad people who want to get the benefit by sending spam emails. The report shows that the amount of emails sent through the internet in a day can be more than 10 billion among these 45% are spams. The amount is not constant as sometimes it goes higher than what is noted here. This indicates clearly the magnitude of the problem and calls for the need for more efforts to be applied to reduce this amount and also minimize the effects from the spam messages. Various measures have been taken to eliminate this problem. Once people used social methods, that is legislative means of control and now they are using technological methods which are more effective and timely in catching spams as these work by analyzing the messages content. In this paper we compare the performance of machine learning algorithms by doing the experiment for testing English language dataset, Swahili language dataset individual and combined two dataset to form one, and results from combined dataset compared them with the Gmail classifier. The classifiers which the researcher used are Naïve Bayes (NB), Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) and k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN). The results for combined dataset shows that SMO classifier lead the others by achieve 98.60% of accuracy, followed by k-NN classifier which has 97.20% accuracy, and Naïve Bayes classifier has 92.89% accuracy. From this result the researcher concludes that SMO classifier can work better in dataset that combined English and Swahili languages. In English dataset shows that SMO classifier leads other algorism, it achieved 97.51% of accuracy, followed by k-NN with average accuracy of 93.52% and the last but also good accuracy is Naïve Bayes that come with 87.78%. Swahili dataset Naïve Bayes lead others by getting 99.12% accuracy followed by SMO which has 98.69% and the last was k-NN which has 98.47%