X-MAP Profiles Misclassifications in Spam Detection

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💡New explainable tool flags spam detector errors 2x better via topic divergence—boost reliability now

⚡ 30-Second TL;DR

What changed

Combines SHAP feature attributions with NMF for interpretable topic profiles

Why it matters

Enhances spam/phishing detectors by providing interpretable insights into failures, reducing false negatives that expose users and false positives that erode trust. Serves as a plug-in repair layer for existing models with high recovery rates.

What to do next

Integrate SHAP and scikit-learn NMF into your spam classifier pipeline to profile and flag misclassifications.

Who should care:Researchers & Academics

🧠 Deep Insight

Web-grounded analysis with 6 cited sources.

🔑 Key Takeaways

•X-MAP combines SHAP feature attributions with non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to derive interpretable topic profiles for true positives (TP) and true negatives (TN) in spam/phishing detection[1][2].
•Misclassified messages exhibit at least 2x larger Jensen-Shannon divergence from reliable topic profiles compared to correctly classified ones, enabling effective anomaly detection[1][2].
•As a standalone detector, X-MAP achieves up to 0.98 AUROC and reduces false-rejection rate to 0.089 at 95% true rejection rate (TRR) on positive predictions[1][2].

🛠️ Technical Deep Dive

X-MAP operates in four stages: (1) Train a binary classifier for spam/phishing detection; (2) Compute SHAP values for each feature in message pairs to capture contributions to positive/negative classes; (3) Apply NMF to SHAP matrices for interpretable topics and group profiles for TP/TN; (4) Aggregate message SHAP values into topic distributions and compute JS divergence from reliable profiles[2].

🔮 Future ImplicationsAI analysis grounded in cited sources

X-MAP advances explainable AI in cybersecurity by providing interpretable insights into spam/phishing misclassifications, potentially improving base detectors, reducing user trust erosion from false positives, and enabling targeted model repairs in production systems.

⏳ Timeline

2026-02

X-MAP paper submitted to arXiv (v1 on Feb 17, 2026), introducing explainable framework for spam/phishing misclassification profiling

📎 Sources (6)

Factual claims are grounded in the sources below. Forward-looking analysis is AI-generated interpretation.

X-MAP is an explainable framework combining SHAP attributions and NMF to create topic profiles for correctly classified spam/phishing vs. legitimate messages. It detects misclassifications via Jensen-Shannon divergence from these profiles. Experiments achieve 0.98 AUROC and recover 97% of false rejections when used as a repair layer.

Key Points

1.Combines SHAP feature attributions with NMF for interpretable topic profiles
2.Measures message deviation using Jensen-Shannon divergence
3.Misclassified messages show 2x larger divergence than correct ones
4.Achieves 0.98 AUROC as detector; recovers 97% false rejections
5.Lowers false-rejection rate to 0.089 at 95% true rejection rate

Impact Analysis

Technical Details

Uses SHAP for local feature importance and NMF to decompose into non-negative topic factors for spam/legit profiles. Computes JS divergence between message topic distribution and class prototypes. Tested on SMS spam and phishing URL datasets.

#explainability #spam-detection #phishing #topic-modelingx-map

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