If you are not someone with a deep statistical knowledge, understanding the methods developed by the Reverend John Bayes can be quite difficult. You will also have the problem of how do you explain to say a non-technical manager, that a computer program is telling you to do something that is against his gut feeling.

Daisy's unique ability to visualise data in several dimensions at the same time, is a practical way of illustrating the results of the Bayesian analysis.

Bayesian methods are best explained with a simple example, of which we are all familiar.

If you look at an E-Mail message, you can instantly decide if it's 'spam' or one you want to receive.

But how do you make this decision?

Experience tells you that certain words mean that a message may well be 'spam'. Others, would make it likely it is not. For instance, Paul Graham has never found the simple word 'describe' in 'spam'.

We then apply a series of weighting to various words and make that decision. And we usually get it right! Often by just looking at the subject of the message too!

In some ways Bayesian methods can be thought of as a statistical interpretation of this decision process.