In Kevin Murphy's book "Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective" he cites the following paper [1] which shows that the simple Bayesian classifier "perform

In Kevin Murphy's book "Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective" he cites the following paper [1] which shows that the simple Bayesian classifier "performs surprisingly well in many domains containing clear attribute dependencies" and contains numerous experimental trials (in different domains). I haven't fully read the paper myself (glanced through it) but KM's makes the same point as OPs which leads me to believe it may have the answer to your question. [1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/classes/ecs271/Bayesian.pdf http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/classes/ecs271/Bayesian.pd...