A test for a certain disease is found to be 95% accurate, meaning that it will correctly
Question:
A test for a certain disease is found to be 95% accurate, meaning that it will correctly diagnose the disease in 95 out of 100 people who have the ailment. The test is also 95% accurate for a negative result, meaning that it will correctly exclude the disease in 95 out of 100 people who do not have the ailment. For a certain segment of the population, the incidence of the disease is 4%.
Question: The probability you obtained in (1) is much smaller than 0.95, if your computation is correct. Hence, You can conclude that there is only a much smaller probability to claim “the person really has the disease” after knowing that “the test is positive”, though the test has 95% “correctness”. Explain this difference.
Statistics The Exploration & Analysis of Data
ISBN: 978-1133164135
7th edition
Authors: Roxy Peck, Jay L. Devore