[Spambayes] Re: Spambayes Digest, Vol 52, Issue 26
Bill Yerazunis
wsy at merl.com
Tue Dec 17 08:11:05 EST 2002
From: "T. Alexander Popiel" <popiel@wolfskeep.com>
[...]
I now well understand why Tim Peters lost interest in algorithm
tweaking; until the amount of spam leaking through increases by an
order of magnitude, I'm probably just going to ignore it, as I
ignored it for the five years before last summer. The good is the
enemy of the perfect, too.
Completely correct. When testing for > 99.9% accuracy requires that
you grab fresh spam for a month, and the spam mutation rate introduces
new spams at almost that rate, it just isn't fun any more.
The question to ask is "how good is good enough?" As a human I'm good
to 99.84 % accuracy in classifying spam, so maybe that's good enough
and the pursuit of four-nines accuracy is a windmill to tilt at.
I'm not sure yet, but it's an interesting hypothesis to consider.
-Bill Yerazunis
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