A Dual-Pipeline Imbalance-Robust Framework for SMS Spam Detection: Achieving Flawless Precision via SMOTE-Augmented Ensembles with Rigorous Statistical Validation

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of digital communication has exponentially increased the volume of Short Message Service (SMS) spam, exposing mobile users to systemic convenience disruptions, productivity drops, and severe financial losses through sophisticated fraudulent schemes. To construct a highly dependable filtering mechanism, this study presents a rigorous dual-pipeline machine learning framework that systematically addresses the challenges of class imbalance in statistical text mining. Utilizing a verified dataset of 5,572 Indonesian-context short messages, the raw textual corpus is subjected to uniform case normalization, structural URL extraction, and character filtering before feature projection via Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization. To overcome the inherent accuracy paradox of skewed class distributions, the experimental design evaluates a baseline pipeline (imbalanced data) against a synthetic data augmentation pipeline leveraging the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) across four distinct classifiers: Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Linear Support Vector Machine (Linear SVM), and Random Forest. Empirical results demonstrate that while the baseline Linear SVM serves as the optimal standalone model for overall balance, achieving a peak accuracy of 98.11% and a dominant F1-Score of 92.83%, the SMOTE-augmented Random Forest configuration yields an exceptional high-security alternative by securing a flawless 100.00% precision envelope alongside an 83.89% recall rate. Advanced post-hoc evaluations including McNemar's statistical significance tests (,  for Random Forest), qualitative error analyses of semantic edge cases, and runtime profiling confirm that the developed architecture establishes a highly scalable, mathematically verified, and low-latency solution suitable for integration into real-time telecom filtering gateways.