Bayesian Filters Predict Sundance 123
JohnGrahamCumming writes "The LA Times reports on a company's use of Bayesian filtering to predict the winners at the Sundance Film Festival. They use a modified POPFile email filter and claim an 81% success rate."
Re:Fuck films... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, I don't think we can yet predict stock prices with the same 81% accuracy as in this article. And, if anyone could, they would be wise to keep it to themselves.
Re:Bayesian filter to predict Slashdot's new stori (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Statistical methods? (Score:3, Informative)
John.
Re:Shocking news! (Score:4, Informative)
Time to brush up on geography. It rains pretty much all the time in Cherrapunji [wikipedia.org].
Re:Unimpressed (Score:3, Informative)
In terms of search this is perhaps more clear, so consider Google. You issue Google a search query and it returns a bunch of results. Precision measures how many of the results returned are actually relevant, and recall measures how many of the relevant results were actually returned. One could get 100% precision by returning just one result which could be verified as relevant (or, in the above case, verified as spam), and one could get 100% recall by simply returning everything. Oftentimes one takes the harmonic mean of the two, called the F-score in this case, as an overall measure of the success of the algorithm. In other instances one might want to favor precision over recall or vice versa.
I think they probably mean "81% precision," but a low recall means that you'll have many spam emails which are not marked. Of course, if they mean the opposite, then low precision could mean many marked emails which are not spam!