Subject: Re: [Asrg] 2a. Analysis - Spam filled with words

From: "Terry Sullivan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 12:53:14 -0500

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 12:00:06 -0400, Jon Kyme wrote:

> ...content analysis type things collapse
> measures made on a number of axes into one metric. 

Perzactly.  And they have to, ultimately, because the delivery 
decision itself is binary.  It's basically the same problem that 
search engines confront when they collapse a high-dimensional 
document space into a 1-D space like a relevance-ranked list, where 
the documents below some lower-limit threshold are not displayed.

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From: "Jon Kyme" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 21:03:17 +0100

> the documents below some lower-limit threshold are not displayed.

No. I think you're confusing the dimensionality of the *metric* with the
"ultimately ... binary" (in this application) disposition *decision*. I can
make a spam/ham decision based on the location of a message in some
n-dimensional field ... n can be greater than 1. I may be able to make a
more accurate decision when n is greater than 1. Of course this may be
prohibitively expensive to compute. But any system which makes more than
one metric (if they're anything like orthogonal) available to the filtering
mechanism can allow just this kind of use.

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