IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI)
Vol 15, No 3: June 2026

Enhancing phishing website detection: a comparative study of SMOTETomek-XGB and SMOTEENN-XGB

Kamal Omari (University Ibn Zohr)
Ayoub Oukhatar (University Ibn Zohr)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Jun 2026

Abstract

In the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, phishing websites continue to be a persistent threat, challenging detection methods due to the significant class imbalance between phishing and legitimate websites. This study evaluates the effectiveness of two advanced hybrid-resampling techniques SMOTETomek and SMOTEENN integrated with the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier to enhance phishing website detection. SMOTETomek combines the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) with Tomek links, creating synthetic examples and eliminating overlapping instances to address dataset imbalance. SMOTEENN, on the other hand, merges SMOTE with edited nearest neighbors (ENN) to improve class balance through synthetic sample generation and noise reduction. The comparative analysis reveals that both methods significantly enhance classification performance, SMOTETomek-XGB consistently outperforms SMOTEENN-XGB across key evaluation metrics, including accuracy, F1 score, recall, and receiver operating characteristic - area under the curve (ROC-AUC), underscoring its superior effectiveness in distinguishing phishing sites from legitimate ones. This study offers practical insights into the application of advanced resampling methods for improving machine learning model performance in cybersecurity.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

IJAI

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Engineering

Description

IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI) publishes articles in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The scope covers all artificial intelligence area and its application in the following topics: neural networks; fuzzy logic; simulated biological evolution algorithms (like ...