The Naive Bayes Mystery: A classification detective story

Many studies have been made to compare the many different methods of supervised classification which have been developed. While conducting a large meta-analysis of such studies, we spotted some anomalous results relating to the Naive Bayes method. This paper describes our detailed investigation into these anomalies. We conclude that a very large comparative study probably mislabelled another method as Naive Bayes, and that the Statlog project used the right method, but possibly incorrectly reported its provenance. Such mistakes, while not too harmful in themselves, can become seriously misleading if blindly propagated by citations which do not examine the source material in detail.