Matt Kettler wrote:
The only problem I see with this approach is that it treats false positives and
false negatives as being equally bad.
We do get many more false negatives than false positives, even though we
don't get false positives very often - they are rare.
We certainly don't get 1 fp for every fn.
In general, you're adjusting the score bias so the number of FP's and FNs are
approximately equal.
This is not what we are seeing in practice. It's not even close to 50-50.
Although STATISTICS*.txt would suggest that this boundary
occurs somewhere near 2.0, your own local biases could change this considerably.
SA's normal scoreset is evolved with the concept that it's better to have 99
false negatives than 1 false positive.
We are very glad and happy about this concept and implementation.
The concept here is most people use
scripts to move their spam into a separate folder, or auto delete it. With that
going on, a FP is potentially lost valid email, whereas a FN is a minor
inconvenience.
Yes.... We work hard to inform our users and to actively solicit their
feedback on how the system is working and to lookout for the system
misplacing emails, especially valid ones. I know it's still not perfect....
For any site that considers FPs to be "not too bad" because all mail is manually
examined anyway, lowering the score threshold may be a workable thing.
However, other sites that auto-delete such messages may have considerable
problems if they lower the threshold
YES!
