[Spambayes] Re: Practical applications

[Tim Peters]

[David Eppstein]
> That would be Support Vector Machines.

So they are!

> They are one of the standard techniques for classification problems
> such as this one.  I haven't tried looking at the patent, and I'm not
> a classification expert (we  have other people in my dept. who are),

So why aren't they here helping <wink>?

> but the only possible new idea  (which I doubt is new to MS, and it's
> very obvious) would be the same one you're using here: try using mildly
> sophisticated but standard classification algorithms instead of ad-hoc
> pattern matching in the specific area of spam detection.

It's not new with MS; there are at least a dozen papers in the open
literature specifically applying Bayesian classification to the spam
classification task.

> Speaking of which, has anyone tried boosting?  You should be able to
> plug it in on top of other methods such as the one you're doing here.

Nobody in this specific project has -- give it a shot!