Hi SpamBayes developers, I just wanted to let you know that I used SpamBayes for my term project in my Machine Learning class, and to say thanks. I thought there might be some academic interest here, and that I'd share with the list in return for the great code of yours that I used.
The overall assignment was to "do something with evolutionary algorithms." The goal of my project was more or less to attack a spam filter and attempt to use an EA to find weaknesses it might have. I set up a blind watchmaker sort of natural selection/ evolution environment using a SpamBayes filter that I had trained on an old training corpus as the fitness function. The program I wrote attempted to evolve a generic formula that worked sort of like "MadLibs" to write spam emails that could get past the filter. I started off with almost zero knowledge of how a spam filter works, and tried to keep it that way while I wrote the algorithm so that it would be as naive as possible. I've since read up on SpamBayes and some of the math behind it, and it looks really interesting. I'm looking forward to taking more time to look through the codebase. Now that the project is completed, I see where I could have trained the filter on different content or parts of the evolution structure that I could have written differently to make this project more successful, but that's research for you! This was a very quick proof of concept project, and if I were to continue with this research there are certainly a lot of things I would do differently and many more complicated techniques that I'd like to try. If anyone is interested in reading about the project in more detail, I've posted the paper I wrote here: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~egifford/classes/egiffordTermProject.pdf Thanks again for maintaining this cool project. I hope you'll take my contribution in the intellectual sense that is intended, and not as an attack. :) Liz Gifford _______________________________________________ spambayes-dev mailing list spambayes-dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes-dev
