A Naive Bayes classifier is a type of probabilistic classifier, or an algorithm that assigns a probability distribution to the potential outcomes. As opposed to a binary classification, such as Male or Female, the probabilistic classifier tells you there is an 87% chance this data point is Male and a 13% chance it is Female.
Not all probabilistic classifiers are Bayesian, nor are they all necessarily naive. The term Naive, in this context, is not a veiled insult to the classifier—it's a mathematical term that has a meaning in probability theory, which we'll discuss further later. The term Bayes or Bayesian means that the principles used in the classifier were first published by Reverend Thomas Bayes, an 18th century mathematician, popular for his Bayes theorem in probability theory.
Let's first have a probability refresher. First, you...