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Thanks, yes, that's what it's called. All due credit to Laplace for the technique, but the word "smoothing" is making me wince, because it makes it sound as th

by dreish 19y ago

Thanks, yes, that's what it's called. All due credit to Laplace for the technique, but the word "smoothing" is making me wince, because it makes it sound as though this is some artificial approximation. For the assumption of an even distribution of probabilities, n+1 / m+2 really _is_ the exact probability of the event repeating. Like I said, you can confirm this experimentally with a quick program.

apgwoz 19y ago
There are other smoothing techniques more prevalent in NLP that I'm learning about in my NLP class which distribute probability mass more evenly, but really won't help (at least I don't think so) in a classifier. Witten-Bell and Good-Turing are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.