Nicholas J. Horton, Jie Chao, William Finzer, and Phebe Palmer

The world is full of data, and much of it is unstructured. An example is text data, which forms a critical part of our lives through books, magazines, and the internet. Surprisingly, despite the key role of language arts in all aspects of education, text analysis has not traditionally played a major part in statistical education.

While there are many interesting literary analyses one might consider, we explore a more mundane but familiar example by looking at a text string taken from an email subject line is spam (an unwanted or inappropriate email message).

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