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Re: False Positive -was- RE: [Asrg] Fwd: Returned mail: see transcript for details

2003-04-01 12:22:12

I slightly prefer the terms accept/reject over negative/positive.

PROPORTION DEFINITION:

I think that a 2x2 matrix is most straightforward presentation:

        {accept,reject} x {ham,spam}

        accept  reject  total
ham     TA      FR      NHAM = TA+FR
spam    FA      TR      NSPAM = FA+TR
total   TA+FA   FR+TR   NTOTAL

and the most helpful intuitive proportions (I think) would be
FRp = FR/NHAM and FAp = FA/NSPAM.

Numbers will ALWAYS be dependent on a particular corpus.

However, I think that the definitions above will be stable
(measuring classifier quality, not corpus composition) over
a wide range of ham-spam ratios.  Using FR/NTOTAL or FA/NTOTAL
will be dominated by ham-spam ratio of the test set, obscuring
the performance of the classifier, making results unnecessarily
corpus-specific.


OTHER MEASURES:

Precision/recall curves are another candidate.


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