[Spambayes] Incremental Training for ham in Outlook Plugin?

Tim Stone tim at aterraform.com
Wed Apr 26 05:28:17 CEST 2006


Believe me, if you read back through the archives in... 2003?... the 
training debate went on ad-infinitum.

I think the original question though, was "I want to train ham as ham 
and I don't know how to do that easily." I can't answer that question, 
cause I don't use Outlook (on purpose). Maybe someone can address that.

Jesse Pelton wrote:

> This is one for the training gurus. You can find a discussion of 
> various training approaches on the SpamBayes wiki 
> (http://www.entrian.com/sbwiki/TrainingIdeas).
> That said, I'll put my oar in. In general, the recommendation of the 
> gurus is along the lines of "don't worry, be happy:" as long as you're 
> getting satisfactory results, just use the training buttons to correct 
> classification errors. The bottom line is the quality of the results 
> you're getting; the suggestion to keep the ham:spam ratio close to 1 
> is a guideline that seems to help achieve that result. I follow that 
> approach, and when I notice that I'm getting unsatisfactory results 
> over a period of time, I just discard my training database and start 
> over. SpamBayes learns very quickly, so I don't find it worthwhile to 
> try to tune the database over time.
> Another thing to look at is the threshold scores for possible and 
> certain spam. I've dropped my certain spam threshold somewhat as I've 
> become more confident in my training data (it's now .70). This means 
> fewer possible spam messages that I then train as spam, which reduces 
> the ham:spam imbalance. I'm currently getting good results (>95% 
> correctly classified) with 53 ham and 171 spam trained on.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* spambayes-bounces at python.org 
> [mailto:spambayes-bounces at python.org] *On Behalf Of *Gil Hurlbut
> *Sent:* Monday, April 24, 2006 4:35 PM
> *To:* spambayes at python.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Spambayes] Incremental Training for ham in Outlook Plugin?
>
> The question addresses the fact that SpamBayes is far better at 
> classifying ham once it is trained than it is in keeping up with 
> classifying new spam. I find it necessary to remove many spam messages 
> until I get to the point where the Manager has far more spam than ham. 
> Until I hear a recommendation differently, I’m going to get back to a 
> balance by moving known ham to my Unsure folder and click on “Recover 
> from Spam” to do the incremental training.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>SpamBayes at python.org
>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes
>Check the FAQ before asking: http://spambayes.sf.net/faq.html
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>No virus found in this incoming message.
>Checked by AVG Free Edition.
>Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.4.6/323 - Release Date: 4/24/2006
>  
>



More information about the SpamBayes mailing list