<p>It would be interesting to know what litterature you have read.</p>

<p>As far as I know, Bayesian filters were working very well. That's because the learning is based on the words used, and a Bayesian filter is quick to understand that an email containt "Viagra" is likely spam.</p>

<p>But spammers are not so stupid, and they quickly introduced mispelled word. "VI4GRA" has never been seen in any spam before. In a word: it's easy to work around a Bayesian filter.</p>

<p>Neural Networks can be good at classifying. But there are two difficulties: the choice of measures ; the training data.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-09T11:46:24.423Z
VI4GRAs are pre-processed. They aren't any problem for either of the methods.
Pratik Deoghare
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-11-09T10:22:30.077Z
2011-11-09T10:22:30.077Z
rds
<p>Bayesian filtering is not better than Neural Networks for classifying spam because Bayesian filtering cannot learn a spammer's tactics change but NNs can. </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-28T14:05:47.710Z
2012-06-29T06:12:21.090Z
2012-06-29T06:12:21.090Z
Noaman
<p>According to several people on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/770238/neural-networks-for-email-spam-detection">StackOverflow</a> Bayesian filtering is better than Neural Networks for detecting spam.</p>

<p>According to the literature I've read that shouldn't be the case. Please explain!</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-11-07T18:10:42.047Z
Could you provide links and background information please?
Aaron Sterling
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-29T06:13:46.127Z
This is really out of scope for this site.
Suresh Venkat
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-30T14:55:02.567Z
why is it out of scope? its about machine-learning and ai.artificial-intel. too applied?
vzn
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-06-30T14:57:42.470Z
re the Q unless there is some theoretical proof of deficiency, there is no theoretical reason to prefer one approach or another. as for implementations, it may be that a community might reach a consensus on performance, but that cannot anticipate future improvements to the different approaches. as for "better", that must be carefully defined. is one faster than the other? easier to implement? more accurate? etc?
vzn
<machine-learning><ai.artificial-intel>
Why is Bayesian filtering better than Neural Networks when classifying spam?
Daniel O
# Why is Bayesian filtering better than Neural Networks when classifying spam?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2011-11-07)

According to several people on [StackOverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/770238/neural-networks-for-email-spam-detection) Bayesian filtering is better than Neural Networks for detecting spam.

According to the literature I've read that shouldn't be the case. Please explain!

**Tags:** machine-learning, ai.artificial-intel
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Could you provide links and background information please?  
> **username_2**: This is really out of scope for this site.  
> **username_3**: why is it out of scope? its about machine-learning and ai.artificial-intel. too applied?  
> **username_3**: re the Q unless there is some theoretical proof of deficiency, there is no theoretical reason to prefer one approach or another. as for implementations, it may be that a community might reach a consensus on performance, but that cannot anticipate future improvements to the different approaches. as for "better", that must be carefully defined. is one faster than the other? easier to implement? more accurate? etc?  

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## 2 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2011-11-09. Score: 3

It would be interesting to know what litterature you have read.

As far as I know, Bayesian filters were working very well. That's because the learning is based on the words used, and a Bayesian filter is quick to understand that an email containt "Viagra" is likely spam.

But spammers are not so stupid, and they quickly introduced mispelled word. "VI4GRA" has never been seen in any spam before. In a word: it's easy to work around a Bayesian filter.

Neural Networks can be good at classifying. But there are two difficulties: the choice of measures ; the training data.

> **Comments:**
> **username_5**: VI4GRAs are pre-processed. They aren't any problem for either of the methods.  

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### Answer by username_6 on 2012-06-28. Score: 0

Bayesian filtering is not better than Neural Networks for classifying spam because Bayesian filtering cannot learn a spammer's tactics change but NNs can.


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