Re: A few questions about ifile features compared to other classifiers

Jason Rennie <[email protected]> Fri, 31 Oct 2003 09:04:46 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.mail.ifile.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
[email protected] said:
> 1) storage based on a real database ( Berkeley DB for instance)
> instead of your file format ?  Do you think it would improve its
> performance ?

ifile is pretty fast as is.  Also, it's nice to have the database in ASCII
format---makes it easier for people to figure out what is going on and it
also makes the code easier to debug when there are problems.  Another 
nice benefit is that ifile is small and totally standalone, which has 
its benefits.

[email protected] said:
> Have you tried to adapt the code writed in bogofilter for instance to
> add such features to ifile ? Do you think It's worth trying (I'm
> volunteering) ?

It is worth trying.  I think the most useful thing to do would be to 
adapt features from POPFile, since that would greatly improve ifile's 
spam filter capabilities.

I personally use bogofilter for spam filtering and ifile for everything 
else.

[email protected] said:
> 3) A last thing about sort accuracy. I read in one page that some of
> you reached 96% accurate classification. How have you calculated that
> ? Do you all have such high percentage ?

My accuracy has always been in the 80-90% range, though I keep a lot of 
folders (currently 86), so it might be a bit higher for someone with 
fewer folders.

ifile marks each e-mail with an X-filter: header that identifies the 
version number and the folder into which it classified the e-mail.

Also, the mh-ifile scripts automatically update an ~/.idata_accuracy 
file, which simply calculates (filters-refiles)/(filters), i.e. (# e-mails 
classified correctly)/(total # e-mails classified).

Jason