Mathematical Foundation
Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes' theorem. Bayes' theorem is used several times in the context of spam:
- a first time, to compute the probability that the message is spam, knowing that a given word appears in this message;
- a second time, to compute the probability that the message is spam, taking into consideration all of its words (or a relevant subset of them);
- sometimes a third time, to deal with rare words.
Read more about this topic: Bayesian Spam Filtering
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