Naive Bayes

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Naive Bayes uses word clues and math chance to sort text quickly.

What it does

Naive Bayes uses word clues and math chance to sort text quickly.

Independent: Things that don't affect each other • Probability: Math chance

How it works

  • Look at words that appeared in old examples.
  • Give each word a chance score for each group.
  • Combine the word scores and pick the most likely group.

Uses and applications

  • Gmail can use this idea to help move junk emails into Spam.
  • A school filter can flag rude comments for a teacher to review.
  • A help desk can send messages about “password” to the account team.

In short

It is a fast probability calculator for sorting text, especially spam emails.

Related methods

  • Logistic Regression: Another classifier that outputs a probability.
  • TF-IDF: Another way to weight words when turning text into features.

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