Reference no: EM132850339

If you want to know how important spam filters are to your online experience, try turning them off for a day. You'll quickly see why these tools we tend to take for granted are so essential. Generally speaking, a filtering solution applied to your email system uses a set of protocols to determine which incoming messages are spam and which are not. What the filters checks on can vary, but often they all do basically the same thing: scan header information for evidence of malice, look up senders on blacklists of known spammers, and filter content for patterns that point to junk mail.

1. Suppose that this particular spam filter classifies spam as any email getting 50 points or higher. However, you reset the filter to use 60 points or higher before classifying it as spam. Is that analogous to choosing a higher or lower alpha level for a hypothesis test. Explain in terms of the hypotheses above.

2. What impact does this change in the spam cutoff value have on the chance of each type of error in hypothesis testing? Explain.

3. What does "power" mean in this context of the spam filter, and how is it related to one of the two types of errors? Explain in terms of the hypotheses above.