Re: Training Bayes properly

[Loren Wilton]

You are into the land of opinions here, so you will get different answers.   1.    The 200 ham and 200 spam is a hard minimum.  You can change this.  But don't. So you MUST give Bayes at least 200 each ham and spam before it will start doing anything.  What you give it for ham should hopefully be fairly representative of the ham your sites really gets.  Likewise the spam should be moderately representative of average spam.   Once you have the basic stuff I personally prefer to leave auto-learning turned off and only had Bayes hams and spams that might be misclassified, or ones where the bayes score isn't high enough in the appropriate direction.  Others may want to do things differently.   Personally I'd say that you REALLY should turn off auto-learning at the start, until you have got Bayes a good start in life by hand.  Once you have it working and you are happy with it you may want to turn auto-learning back on, or may not.  If you do turn it back on, you probably want to set bayes-ham-threshold (or whatever the name really is) to around -.1 rather than the default value.           Loren ----- Original Message ----- From: Leigh Sharpe To: users Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 4:45 PM Subject: Training Bayes properly So it looks like I have to reset my Bayes and re-train it. I want to do it properly this time. I will be making sure I personally review every message that our users put into the spam folder first, to make sure they haven't put spam into the wrong folder. However, I have a couple of questions:   1) Am I better off to feed it a few emails a day, or wait until I get a few hundred, then feed them all to sa-learn at once? Is there really a difference? 2) How many spams should I feed it? I've heard in some places that 200 is OK, I've heard elsewhere that 10000 or more are needed. 3) Just how 'balanced' should it's diet be? Should I use the same quantity of ham as spam, or can I get away with less ham than spam?     Regards,              Leigh   Leigh Sharpe Network Systems Engineer Pacific Wireless Ph +61 3 9584 8966 Mob 0408 009 502 email [EMAIL PROTECTED] web www.pacificwireless.com.au