[Spambayes] Score Interpretation

Tony Meyer tameyer at ihug.co.nz
Thu Jan 19 09:43:36 CET 2006


> I am having trouble interpreting the score from the spam clues. The  
> information is listed below. How do I tell if the mail will be  
> marked as spam or not? Many thanks for your help.
>
> Combined Score: 0% (1.32361e-005)
> Internal ham score (*H*): 0.999974
> Internal spam score (*S*): 2.10942e-015
>
> # ham trained on: 1
> # spam trained on: 0

In addition to Jesse's comments: notice (if you haven't already) that  
you have only trained on one ham and no spam.  This means that  
*everything* will look like ham (because the classifier doesn't know  
what anything else looks like).  You won't really get results that  
make a lot of sense until you've trained on at least 5 messages of  
each type.

Note also that it's generally a good idea to keep the number of ham  
and spam trained roughly balanced, if possible.  2::1 or 1::3 isn't  
really a problem, but you may get very odd results with 50::1 or  
1::200 etc.

=Tony.Meyer

-- 
Please always include the list (spambayes at python.org) in your replies
(reply-all), and please don't send me personal mail about SpamBayes.
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer/writing/reply_all.html explains this.




More information about the SpamBayes mailing list