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Data Science from Scratch
book

Data Science from Scratch

by Joel Grus
April 2015
Beginner
328 pages
7h 18m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Data Science from Scratch

Chapter 13. Naive Bayes

It is well for the heart to be naive and for the mind not to be.

Anatole France

A social network isn’t much good if people can’t network. Accordingly, DataSciencester has a popular feature that allows members to send messages to other members. And while most of your members are responsible citizens who send only well-received “how’s it going?” messages, a few miscreants persistently spam other members about get-rich schemes, no-prescription-required pharmaceuticals, and for-profit data science credentialing programs. Your users have begun to complain, and so the VP of Messaging has asked you to use data science to figure out a way to filter out these spam messages.

A Really Dumb Spam Filter

Imagine a “universe” that consists of receiving a message chosen randomly from all possible messages. Let S be the event “the message is spam” and V be the event “the message contains the word viagra.” Then Bayes’s Theorem tells us that the probability that the message is spam conditional on containing the word viagra is:

The numerator is the probability that a message is spam and contains viagra, while the denominator is just the probability that a message contains viagra. Hence you can think of this calculation as simply representing the proportion of viagra messages that are spam.

If we have a large collection of messages we know are spam, and a large collection ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491901410Errata Page