classifier questions

Hello, 

I've only recently learned of CRM114 and have begin to experiment 
with it as a possible addon to our current spam filtering setup. 

I've begun by training CRM with various of its classifiers on known 
ham and spam samples and then comparing the results of the 
trained filters on a quasi-random sample of incoming email. 

(The sample sizes I'm using are small, but I think the trends 
are genuine.) 

Questions: 

1) The docs and comments are inconsistent as to good values 
for thickness.  Based on comments in the default mailfilter.cf 
file and crm114-200904023-BlameSteveJobs.src/CRM114_Mailfilter_HOWTO.txt 
I've picked the following values out of the air for initial testing 

Hyper => 0.1 () 
Markovian => 0.05 
OSB/OSBF => 5.0 
Winnow => 10.0 

How do I know if the values I've chosen are "good?" 
How might I attempt to "optimize" the thickness value to use? 


2) the Hyper, OSB, OSBF and Markovian score distributions all 
appear to be roughly gaussian to the eye, centered about zero
(though OSB and Markovian have a few way-out-there outliers)

Is a gaussian distribution expected for these classifiers? 

3) Winnow's score distribution is "bell-ish" in shape, but with 
a peak well to the positive of zero. 

Is this expected? 

4) How do I try the bit-entropy classifier?  There's only one 
mention of it in the mailfilter.cf file under decision_length. 


Dean Takemori
Systems Support Supervisor
TD Food Group
[email protected]

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