Karsten Bräckelmann wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 23:35 +0200, mouss wrote:
>> Warren Togami wrote:
>>> I scanned my spam folders and found a few false positives that hit on
>>> either DNSWL
>> FP with DNSWL?????
>>
>> FP = False Positive = legitimaite mail tagged as spam
>> DNSWL = Whitelist
>
> False positive. Something, that matches (positive) the criterion for a
> certain test, but should not (false).
>
>> if your system adds points because of dnswl, you have a serious problem. ..
>>
>> or do you mean FN (false negative)?
>
> Granted, the wording ("FPs that hit ham rules") could need some polish,
> but I believe Warren was talking about spam that falsely hits ham rules.
>
>
you can certainly devise a system to detect alpha(foo) where alpha is a
function mapping a Banach space to a Hilbert Space, and define what FP,
FN, FX mean in the context you consider. you can also say "let PI=69,
... ". but conventions are here for a reason. they allow us to
understand each others more easily. the fact that children of today can
solve computation problems that "great scientists" of the old times
couldn't handle is thanks to conventions (think of a/b * c/d =
(a*c)/(b*d), which looks trivial today, but wasn't before).
when talking about spam or intrusion detection, FN means "missing" and
FP means "false alarm". if we allow defining FN and FP differently, then
we'll need to rewrite a lot of books, reports, articles, ...
