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
Famous quotes containing the words mathematical and/or foundation:
“An accurate charting of the American woman’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time—but like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal. . . . Each time, the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line.”
—Susan Faludi (20th century)
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)