A MapReduce based parallel SVM for large scale spam filtering

Spam continues to inflict increased damage. Varying approaches including Support Vector Machine (SVM) based techniques have been proposed for spam classification. However, SVM training is a computationally intensive process. This paper presents a parallel SVM algorithm for scalable spam filtering. By distributing, processing and optimizing the subsets of the training data across multiple participating nodes, the distributed SVM reduces the training time significantly. Ontology based concepts are also employed to minimize the impact of accuracy degradation when distributing the training data amongst the SVM classifiers.