RE: FINANCE: Bayes' Bucks

From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 01:09:33 MDT

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    From: Keith Elis [mailto:hagbard@ix.netcom.com]
    >
    > I've been watching this company for a couple of months. Their
    > financials are weak, but ignoring fiduciary arcana, this is a
    > damn cool idea. I had been batting around some ideas
    > (hopelessly primitive) about brute-force context-mapping as
    > an approach to langauge translation software, but I just
    > never knew enough about Bayesian stats to come up with what
    > these guys have apparently been working on since the early
    > 90s. BTW, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't own any
    > stock in this company.
    >
    >
    > Autonomy Corporation plc
    > (NasdaqNM:AUTN)

    Just FYI, the use of Bayesian techniques in automatic text
    classifiers, search tools, and other knowledge management software is
    actually fairly common. For example, Microsoft SharePoint Portal
    Server uses Bayesian techniques to automatically classify documents.
    So I wouldn't get too hung up on this as a competitive advantage of
    this particular corporation.

    Nor does the application of Bayesian techniques guarantee good
    results. As another example, the Microsoft Office Answer Wizard uses
    Bayesian techniques to help locate the right help topic in response to
    a user query, but it still gets it wrong all too often.

    mez

    Disclaimer: I worked for MSFT for several years. The above
    information is all public at this time.



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