Email Classification : An evaluation of Deep Neural Networks with Naive Bayes

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) is an area of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn data patterns without prior programming for those patterns. Using neural networks in this area is based on simulating the biological functions of neurons in brains to learn patterns in data, giving computers a predictive ability to comprehend how data can be clustered. This research investigates the possibilities of using neural networks for classifying email, i.e. working as an email case manager. A Deep Neural Network (DNN) are multiple layers of neurons connected to each other by trainable weights. The main objective of this thesis was to evaluate how the three input arguments - data size, training time and neural network structure – affects the accuracy of Deep Neural Networks pattern recognition; also an evaluation of how the DNN performs compared to the statistical ML method, Naïve Bayes, in the form of prediction accuracy and complexity; and finally the viability of the resulting DNN as a case manager. Results show an improvement of accuracy on our networks with the increase of training time and data size respectively. By testing increasingly complex network structures (larger networks of neurons with more layers) it is observed that overfitting becomes a problem with increased training time, i.e. how accuracy decrease after a certain threshold of training time. Naïve Bayes classifiers performs worse than DNN in terms of accuracy, but better in reduced complexity; making NB viable on mobile platforms. We conclude that our developed prototype may work well in tangent with existing case management systems, tested by future research.