What is a false negative?

A false negative is the little kid brother of a false positive. If POPFile (or any other mail filtering software) classifies a spam message as ham (good), we have a false negative. False negatives may be irksome, but false positives can be dangerous.

POPFile can do a lot more than just classify spam and ham however. It can sort mail in any number of buckets (e.g. personal, work, spam, subscriptions). In the event that an email is incorrectly classified, there will be a false positive reported for the bucket it was initially placed in AND a false negative reported for the bucket that you reclassify the message into. An unclassified message will be counted as a false negative.

See also false positive

 
glossary/falsenegative.txt · Last modified: 2008/02/08 19:49 by 127.0.0.1

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