When copy editors make things worse

“Besides getting more data, faster, we also now use much more sophisticated learning algorithms. For instance, algorithms based on logistic regression and that support vector machines can reduce by half the amount of spam that evades filtering, compared to Naive Bayes.” (Emphasis added.)

— Joshua Goodman, Gordon V. Cormack, and David Heckerman. 2007. Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 50, number 2, page 27.

[Update 4 June 2011: I’ve commented further on the benefits and pitfalls of copyediting, with discussion of this example, here.]

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