Implementing Bayesian classifier in Ruby?

Question

I would like to implement a simple Bayesian classification system to do rudimentary sentiment analysis on short messages. Practical suggestions for implementing in Ruby would be welcome. Suggestions for other approaches besides Bayes would also be welcome.

Answer 1

Ilya Grigorik has a nice answer to this problem over on this blog post on Bayesian Classifiers

Additionally, you may wish to take a look at the ai4r rubygem for some alternates to Bayesian Classifiers.

ID3 is a good choice because it gives a decision tree that is "understandable" to even someone without any real understanding of machine learning techniques.

Answer 2

I've just released the nbayes gem which is a full-featured, robust, and high performance Naive Bayes classifier in Ruby. It makes tasks like sentiment analysis simple. Please read the tutorial for more info.