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False Negatives
A false positive is an error in binary classification in which a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition (such as a disease when the disease is not present), while a false negative is the opposite error, where the test result incorrectly indicates the absence of a condition when it is actually present. These are the two kinds of errors in a binary test, in contrast to the two kinds of correct result (a and a ). They are also known in medicine as a false positive (or false negative) diagnosis, and in statistical classification as a false positive (or false negative) error. In statistical hypothesis testing the analogous concepts are known as type I and type II errors, where a positive result corresponds to rejecting the null hypothesis, and a negative result corresponds to not rejecting the null hypothesis. The terms are often used interchangeably, but there are differences in detail and interpretation due to the differences between medical testing and statis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is a 2005 essay written by John Ioannidis, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, and published in ''PLOS Medicine''. It is considered foundational to the field of metascience. In the paper, Ioannidis argued that a large number, if not the majority, of published medical research papers contain results that cannot be replicated. In simple terms, the essay states that scientists use hypothesis testing to determine whether scientific discoveries are significant. "Significance" is formalized in terms of probability, and one formalized calculation ("''P value''") is reported in the scientific literature as a screening mechanism. Ioannidis posited assumptions about the way people perform and report these tests; then he constructed a statistical model which indicates that most published findings are false positive results. Argument Suppose that in a given scientific field there is a known baseline probability that a result i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary Classification
Binary classification is the task of classifying the elements of a set into two groups (each called ''class'') on the basis of a classification rule. Typical binary classification problems include: * Medical testing to determine if a patient has certain disease or not; * Quality control in industry, deciding whether a specification has been met; * In information retrieval, deciding whether a page should be in the result set of a search or not. Binary classification is dichotomization applied to a practical situation. In many practical binary classification problems, the two groups are not symmetric, and rather than overall accuracy, the relative proportion of different types of errors is of interest. For example, in medical testing, detecting a disease when it is not present (a ''false positive'') is considered differently from not detecting a disease when it is present (a ''false negative''). Statistical binary classification Statistical classification is a problem studied in ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multiple Comparisons
In statistics, the multiple comparisons, multiplicity or multiple testing problem occurs when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously or infers a subset of parameters selected based on the observed values. The more inferences are made, the more likely erroneous inferences become. Several statistical techniques have been developed to address that problem, typically by requiring a stricter significance threshold for individual comparisons, so as to compensate for the number of inferences being made. History The problem of multiple comparisons received increased attention in the 1950s with the work of statisticians such as Tukey and Scheffé. Over the ensuing decades, many procedures were developed to address the problem. In 1996, the first international conference on multiple comparison procedures took place in Israel. Definition Multiple comparisons arise when a statistical analysis involves multiple simultaneous statistical tests, each of which has a potent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Error
An error (from the Latin ''error'', meaning "wandering") is an action which is inaccurate or incorrect. In some usages, an error is synonymous with a mistake. The etymology derives from the Latin term 'errare', meaning 'to stray'. In statistics, "error" refers to the difference between the value which has been computed and the correct value. An error could result in failure or in a deviation from the intended performance or behavior. Human behavior One reference differentiates between "error" and "mistake" as follows: In human behavior the norms or expectations for behavior or its consequences can be derived from the intention of the actor or from the expectations of other individuals or from a social grouping or from social norms. (See deviance.) Gaffes and faux pas can be labels for certain instances of this kind of error. More serious departures from social norms carry labels such as misbehavior and labels from the legal system, such as misdemeanor and crime. Departures ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Classification
In statistics, classification is the problem of identifying which of a set of categories (sub-populations) an observation (or observations) belongs to. Examples are assigning a given email to the "spam" or "non-spam" class, and assigning a diagnosis to a given patient based on observed characteristics of the patient (sex, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.). Often, the individual observations are analyzed into a set of quantifiable properties, known variously as explanatory variables or ''features''. These properties may variously be categorical (e.g. "A", "B", "AB" or "O", for blood type), ordinal (e.g. "large", "medium" or "small"), integer-valued (e.g. the number of occurrences of a particular word in an email) or real-valued (e.g. a measurement of blood pressure). Other classifiers work by comparing observations to previous observations by means of a similarity or distance function. An algorithm that implements classification, especially in a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medical Tests
A medical test is a medical procedure performed to detect, diagnose, or monitor diseases, disease processes, susceptibility, or to determine a course of treatment. Medical tests such as, physical and visual exams, diagnostic imaging, genetic testing, chemical and cellular analysis, relating to clinical chemistry and molecular diagnostics, are typically performed in a medical setting. Types of tests By purpose Medical tests can be classified by their purposes, the most common of which are diagnosis, screening and evaluation. Diagnostic A diagnostic test is a procedure performed to confirm or determine the presence of disease in an individual suspected of having a disease, usually following the report of symptoms, or based on other medical test results. This includes posthumous diagnosis. Examples of such tests are: * Using nuclear medicine to examine a patient suspected of having a lymphoma. * Measuring the blood sugar in a person suspected of having diabetes mellitus after ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Positive And Negative Predictive Values
The positive and negative predictive values (PPV and NPV respectively) are the proportions of positive and negative results in statistics and diagnostic tests that are true positive and true negative results, respectively. The PPV and NPV describe the performance of a diagnostic test or other statistical measure. A high result can be interpreted as indicating the accuracy of such a statistic. The PPV and NPV are not intrinsic to the test (as true positive rate and true negative rate are); they depend also on the prevalence. Both PPV and NPV can be derived using Bayes' theorem. Although sometimes used synonymously, a ''positive predictive value'' generally refers to what is established by control groups, while a post-test probability refers to a probability for an individual. Still, if the individual's pre-test probability of the target condition is the same as the prevalence in the control group used to establish the positive predictive value, the two are numerically equal. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
False Positive Rate
In statistics, when performing multiple comparisons, a false positive ratio (also known as fall-out or false alarm ratio) is the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis for a particular test. The false positive rate is calculated as the ratio between the number of negative events wrongly categorized as positive (false positives) and the total number of actual negative events (regardless of classification). The false positive rate (or "false alarm rate") usually refers to the expectancy of the false positive ratio. Definition The false positive rate is FPR=\frac where \mathrm is the number of false positives, \mathrm is the number of true negatives and N=\mathrm+\mathrm is the total number of ground truth negatives. The level of significance that is used to test each hypothesis is set based on the form of inference ( simultaneous inference vs. selective inference) and its supporting criteria (for example FWER or FDR), that were pre-determined by the researche ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Receiver Operating Characteristic
A receiver operating characteristic curve, or ROC curve, is a graphical plot that illustrates the diagnostic ability of a binary classifier system as its discrimination threshold is varied. The method was originally developed for operators of military radar receivers starting in 1941, which led to its name. The ROC curve is created by plotting the true positive rate (TPR) against the false positive rate (FPR) at various threshold settings. The true-positive rate is also known as sensitivity, recall or ''probability of detection''. The false-positive rate is also known as ''probability of false alarm'' and can be calculated as (1 − specificity). The ROC can also be thought of as a plot of the power as a function of the Type I Error of the decision rule (when the performance is calculated from just a sample of the population, it can be thought of as estimators of these quantities). The ROC curve is thus the sensitivity or recall as a function of fall-out. In general, if the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prior Probability
In Bayesian statistical inference, a prior probability distribution, often simply called the prior, of an uncertain quantity is the probability distribution that would express one's beliefs about this quantity before some evidence is taken into account. For example, the prior could be the probability distribution representing the relative proportions of voters who will vote for a particular politician in a future election. The unknown quantity may be a parameter of the model or a latent variable rather than an observable variable. Bayes' theorem calculates the renormalized pointwise product of the prior and the likelihood function, to produce the ''posterior probability distribution'', which is the conditional distribution of the uncertain quantity given the data. Similarly, the prior probability of a random event or an uncertain proposition is the unconditional probability that is assigned before any relevant evidence is taken into account. Priors can be created using a num ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fallacy Of Transposed Conditional
The prosecutor's fallacy is a fallacy of statistical reasoning involving a test for an occurrence, such as a DNA match. A positive result in the test may paradoxically be more likely to be an erroneous result than an actual occurrence, even if the test is very accurate. The fallacy is named because it is typically used by a prosecutor to exaggerate the probability of a criminal defendant's guilt. The fallacy can be used to support other claims as well – including the innocence of a defendant. For instance, if a perpetrator were known to have the same blood type as a given defendant and 10% of the population to share that blood type, then one version of the prosecutor's fallacy would be to claim that, on that basis alone, the probability that the defendant is guilty is 90%. However, this conclusion is only close to correct if the defendant was selected as the main suspect based on robust evidence discovered prior to the blood test and unrelated to it (the blood match may then ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
P-value
In null-hypothesis significance testing, the ''p''-value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the result actually observed, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. A very small ''p''-value means that such an extreme observed outcome would be very unlikely under the null hypothesis. Reporting ''p''-values of statistical tests is common practice in academic publications of many quantitative fields. Since the precise meaning of ''p''-value is hard to grasp, misuse is widespread and has been a major topic in metascience. Basic concepts In statistics, every conjecture concerning the unknown probability distribution of a collection of random variables representing the observed data X in some study is called a ''statistical hypothesis''. If we state one hypothesis only and the aim of the statistical test is to see whether this hypothesis is tenable, but not to investigate other specific hypotheses, then such a test is called a null ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
