In machine learning, naive Bayes classifiers are a family of simple probabilistic classifiers based on applying Bayes' theorem with strong (naive) independence assumptions between the features.

Naive Bayes has been studied extensively since the 1950s. It was introduced under a different name into the text retrieval community in the early 1960s,[1]:488 and remains a popular (baseline) method for text categorization, the problem of judging documents as belonging to one category or the other (such as spam or legitimate, sports or politics, etc.) with word frequencies as the features. With appropriate pre-processing, it is competitive in this domain with more advanced methods including support vector machines.[2] It also finds application in automatic medical diagnosis.[3]