# Bayes classification with a simple example of mail classification

Every mail is described by a bag of words: $x = (x_1, . . . , x_l)$, where $x_i \in \{0, 1\}$ indicates whether the $i$th word is present or not. We have $n$ training samples ${(x^1,y^1),....(x^n,y^n)}$, where "$y$" indicates if the mail is relevant or not relevant, and we want to classify mails accordingly as either relevant or not relevant.

Task 1: Determine joint distribution, prior and the class conditional distributions $P(x_i|y)$?

Task 2: Consider the class posterior distribution $P(y | x)$ and assume that the cost $c_{1 \to 0}$ for classifying a relevant message as irrelevant is larger than the cost $c_{0 \to 1}$ of classifying an irrelevant message as relevant. The cost of classifying correctly is assumed to be zero. How does the classication rule change?

We can think of this as a Bernoulli trial, where a word $w_i$ is either in the document or it is not. Hence we get

$\operatorname{argmax}_y \prod_{i=1}^n P(x_i|y) = \prod_{i=1}^n P(w_i|k)^{x_i} \cdot (1-P(x_i|y))^{1-x_i}$

$x_i$ is the binary variable indicating if the word $w_i$ is present or not.

With Maximum Likelihood, we can estimate $P(y)$ as the fraction of the documents belonging to the corresponding class. The class-conditional distribution can be calculated similarly: For instance $P(x=x1|y)$, are the fraction of "$x1$" datasamples in class $y$.

Questions:

• Is $P(w_i|k)^{x_i} \cdot (1-P(x_i|y))^{1-x_i}$ the joint distribution (it looks like a conditional distribution)?

• Can you review your edits of this question? Some of the edits to the question have removed some important parts of the question, so that it doesn't really make sense any more. For example you've completely removed that this is a classification of email problem from the question. – Suzu Hirose Aug 2 '17 at 0:50

I will try to make a summary of a Naive Bayes classifier and to explain it for the email classifier problem.

Goal: Classify an email $x=(x_1, \cdots, x_n)$ as relevant ($y=1$) or irrelevant ($y=0$). The goal is therefore to estimate the probability $\mathbb P(y | x)$, which is also called posterior since we evaluate this probability after having seen the email $x$.

Method: To evaluate $\mathbb P(y | x)$ we use the Bayes rule which states that $$\mathbb P(y | x) \mathbb P(x) = \mathbb P(y \cap x) = \mathbb P(x|y)\mathbb P(y)$$

Therefore $$\mathbb P(y | x) = \dfrac{\mathbb P(x|y)\mathbb P(y)}{\mathbb P(x)}$$

However, $\mathbb P(x)$ is fixed because $x$ is fixed. Therefore it is not interesting. And actually we are rather interested in $\textrm{argmax}_y\mathbb P(y | x)$ (to choose between the labels $y=0$ or $y=1$), and therefore we are interested in computing

$$\textrm{argmax}_y\mathbb P(y | x) = \textrm{argmax}_y\mathbb P(x|y)\mathbb P(y)$$

The quantity $\mathbb P(y)$ is called the prior. It is the probability that an email is of the class $y$ if you do not have any additional information (namely you do not know the email yet). To evaluate this prior we consider all the emails that we have at our disposal: let denote them $x^{(1)}, \cdots, x^{(m)}$ and we count how many of them correspond to the class $y=0$ and how many of them correspond to the class $y=1$. This gives the probabilities $\mathbb P(y=0)$ and $\mathbb P(y=1)$.

Now we still have to evaluate the probability $\mathbb P(x|y)$, which is called the likelihood. To do that we use a bag-of-words approach: $x=(x_1, \cdots, x_n)$ as you said in your question. $x_i \in \{0,1\}$ denotes the presence of the word $w_i$ in the email. We get

$$\mathbb P(x|y)=\mathbb P(x_1 \cap \cdots \cap x_n|y)$$

At this point we use the naive (and incorrect) approximation that the $x_i$ are independent conditioned to $y$ to write

$$\mathbb P(x|y)=\mathbb P(x_1 \cap \cdots \cap x_n|y)=\prod_{i=1}^n \mathbb P(x_i|y)$$

To evaluate the probabilities $\mathbb P(x_i|y)$ you only have to count on your training set of emails. For example to compute $\mathbb P(x_1|0)$ you take all your emails corresponding to $y=0$ and you count the number of these emails that contain the word $x_1$.

Finally this answers to the questions of task 1, since we have determined the prior and conditional distributions. The joint distribution $\mathbb P(x \cap y)$ is simply $\mathbb P(x|y)\cdot \mathbb P(y)$ and we have already computed these quantities.

If both costs are equal, we "pay" the same quantity if we do a classification error. Therefore we classify an email $x$ to the class $0$ if $\mathbb P(y=0 |x) > \mathbb P(y=1 |x)$.

In the case where the costs are not the same, let us denote $c_{1 \to 0}$ the cost of classifying a relevant message as irrelevant and $c_{0 \to 1}$ the cost of classifying an irrelevant message as relevant.

Let us now compute the average cost of our classifier. Let us denote $J(p, y)$ this cost, where $p=\mathbb P(y=1 |x)$ (the posterior probability that the message is relevant). For example, $J(p, y=1)$ is the average price we have to pay if we classify an email $x$ in the class $y=1$ if this email has a posterior probability of $p$.

We find $J(p, y=1)=(1-p)\cdot c_{0 \to 1}$ because with probability $1-p$ the email is in the class $0$ and we classify it as in the class $1$. In the same manner we find that $J(p, y=0)=p\cdot c_{1 \to 0}$.

Now the question is, if we have an email with $p=\mathbb P(y=1 |x)$, should we put it in the class $0$ or in the class $1$? To know that we will try to minimize our cost. We will chose the $y$ such that $J(p, y)$ is minimal.

To know that, let us solve $J(p, y=1)<J(p, y=0)$, i.e. $(1-p)\cdot c_{0 \to 1} < p\cdot c_{1 \to 0}$. We get $p \cdot (c_{1 \to 0} + c_{0 \to 1}) >c_{0 \to 1}$, i.e. $$p> \dfrac{c_{0 \to 1}}{c_{1 \to 0} + c_{0 \to 1}}$$

Let us denote $h$ this quantity. We have found that if $p>h$, then $J(p, y=1)<J(p, y=0)$ and then we have to classify the email in the class $y=1$.

Note 1: This means that now we do not look for $\text{argmax}_y \mathbb{P}(y|x)$, because making a classification error has not the same cost depending on the class we choose

Note 2: In your question you say that $c_{1 \to 0} > c_{0 \to 1}$. This means that $h < 0.5$. For example $h=0.4$. Consequently you classify more often emails in the class $1$ than in the class $0$. This is normal because misclassifying an email of class $1$ is more expensive than misclassifying an email of class $0$ and therefore you are "scared" of making an error with an email of class $1$ and then you put more emails in the class $1$.

Note 3: Of course if both costs are equal you find that $h=0.5$ as in the first task.

• I can't tell you how amazing your answer is...thank you so much! Additional questions: i. ML and MAP are often compared, but in fact we use ML for parameter estimation (as you do), and MAP for posterior estimation, which we as here can use for classification - this does seem to me to be quite different 2. Is in general than the loss function here given as y*p+(1-y)(1-p)? 3. I am wondering why in these binomial bag of words tasks, when calculating the probabilities, the bernoulli coefficient is not used to account for the different places a word can appear in a document? – user66280 Aug 2 '17 at 15:13
• Another question: Should it not be p*c_{0-->1} respectively (1-p)*c_{1-->0}. In the first case for instance, we think that the probability for class 1 is high, let's say p = 0.8. If this should be wrong however, then it would class 0 would be true, and hence we have the cost for having classified mistakenly class 0 as a 1. – user66280 Aug 2 '17 at 17:55
• Thank you:) 1. here we use MAP as often in bayesian statistics because we have a prior on $y$. ML would be to optimize $\text{argmax}_y\mathbb P(x|y)$ whereas we optimize $\text{argmax}_y\mathbb P(x|y)\mathbb P(y)$. 2. Yes we can write $J(p,y)=(1-p)yc_{0\to 1}+p(1-y)c_{1\to 0}$. 3. The bag of words approach does not take into account the positions of the words. It is a choice to simplify the problem and this works well in practice (particularly for spam detection). The only interesting thing is therefore the presence of a word but more complex models with the position could be possible as well – fonfonx Aug 3 '17 at 0:07
• In the first case ($y=1$) we classify the mail in the class $1$, and the probability that it is really in the class $1$ is p. Therefore we have a probability of $1-p$ to make an error and to pay $c_{0 \to 1}$ for having classified a mail from class $0$ in class $1$. Thus if $p=0.8$ there is $20\%$ of chances of doing an error and the average price to pay is $0.2 c_{0 \to 1}$. The cost function is the price to pay if we do an error, then in your example in $80\%$ of the cases we don't pay anything. – fonfonx Aug 3 '17 at 0:12
• All clear. Thanks again, you helped a lot. – user66280 Aug 3 '17 at 8:40