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Why Naive Bayes is called Naive?

Bayesian classifiers are statistical classifiers. They can predict class membership probabilities, such as the probability that a given sample belongs to a particular class. Bayesian classifiers have also exhibited high accuracy and speed when applied to a large database.

Once classes are defined, the system should infer rules that govern the classification, therefore the system should be able to find the description of each class. The descriptions should only refer to the predicting attributes of the training set so that only the positive examples should satisfy the description, not the negative examples. A rule is said to be correct if its description covers all the positive examples and none of the negative examples of a class is covered.

It is assuming that the contributions by all attributes are independent and that each contributes equally to the classification problem, a simple classification scheme called Naïve Bayes classification. By analyzing the contribution of each “independent” attribute, a conditional probability is determined. A classification is made by combining the impact that the different attributes have on the prediction to be made.

Naïve Bayes classification is called Naïve because it assumes class conditional independence. The effect of an attribute value on a given class is independent of the values of the other attributes. This assumption is made to reduce computational costs and hence is considered Naïve.