Lexical URL Features: TF-IDF as an Alternative to Hand-Engineering

Treating a URL as text and letting TF-IDF discover discriminative substrings automatically, a runnable URL tokeniser and TF-IDF classifier, and the trade-off between lexical and hand-engineered structured URL features.

~5 min total·4 quadrants of structured content

By the end of this topic, you will

Tokenise a URL into its slash-, dot-, and hyphen-separated parts
Train a TF-IDF plus logistic regression classifier over URL tokens
Explain the trade-off between lexical TF-IDF features and hand-engineered structured features for phishing-URL detection

Quadrant 1 · e-Tutorial

Video lectures and walkthroughs

Video content coming soon.

Quadrant 2 · e-Content

Articles and case studies

Lexical URL Features: TF-IDF as an Alternative to Hand-Engineering

Unit 2 classified phishing URLs using hand-engineered features. There is a second, complementary approach: treat the URL itself as text, tokenise it, and let TF-IDF discover the discriminative substrings automatically.

Quadrant 3 · Web Resources