Hands-On Machine Learning for Cybersecurity

Using the Naive Bayes theorem to detect spam

The Naive Bayes theorem is a classification technique. The basis of this algorithm is Bayes' theorem; the basic assumption is that the predictor variables are independent of each other.

Bayes' theorem is mathematically expressed as follows:

It essentially gives us a trick for calculating conditional probabilities, in situations where it wouldn't be feasible to directly measure them. For instance, if you wanted to calculate someone's chance of having cancer, given their age, instead of performing a nationwide study, you can just take existing statistics about age distribution and cancer and plug ...