Stacking Classifiers for Anti-Spam Filtering of E-Mail

We evaluate empirically a scheme for combining classifiers, known as stacked generalization, in the context of anti-spam filtering, a novel cost-sensitive application of text categorization. Unsolicited commercial email, or “spam”, floods mailboxes, causing frustration, wasting bandwidth, and exposing minors to unsuitable content. Using a public corpus, we show that stacking can improve the efficiency of automatically induced anti-spam filters, and that such filters can be used in reallife applications.