Email Spam Detection Using Hierarchical Attention Hybrid Deep Learning Method

Abstract Email is one of the most widespread ways of communication utilized on a regular basis by millions of people around the world, businesses, and individuals more and more dependent upon emails to communicate and share knowledge and information. Nevertheless, the rise in email users has occurred a dramatic increase in spam emails in recent years. Processing and managing emails properly for individuals and companies are getting increasingly difficult. This article proposes a novel technique for email spam detection that is based on a combination of convolutional neural networks, gated recurrent units, and attention mechanisms. During system training, the network is selectively focused on necessary parts of the email text. The usage of convolution layers to extract more meaningful, abstract, and generalizable features by hierarchical representation is the major contribution of this study. Additionally, this contribution incorporates cross-dataset evaluation, which enables the generation of more independent performance results from the model's training dataset. According to cross-dataset evaluation results, the proposed technique advances the results of the present attention-based techniques by utilizing temporal convolutions, which give us more flexible receptive field sizes are utilized. The suggested technique's findings are compared to those of state-of-the-art models and show that our approach outperforms them.