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Base Rates
Prerequisites
Basic
Concepts
Learning Objectives
- Compute probability of a condition from hits, false alarms, and base
rates using a tree diagram
- Compute probability of a condition from hits, false alarms, and base
rates using Bayes' Theorem
Suppose that at your regular physical exam you
test positive for Disease X. Although Disease X has only mild
symptoms, you are concerned and ask your doctor about the accuracy
of the test. It turns out that the test is 95% accurate. It would
appear that the probability that you have Disease X is therefore
0.95. However, the situation is not that simple.
For one thing, more information about the accuracy
of the test is needed because there two kinds of errors the
test can make: misses
and false
positives. If you actually had Disease X and the test failed
to detect it, that would be a miss. If you did not have Disease
X and the test indicated you did, that would be a false positive.
The miss and false positive rates are not necessarily the same.
For example, suppose that the test accurately indicates the
disease in 99% of the people who have it and accurately indicates
no disease in 91% of the people who do not have it. In other
words, the test has a miss rate of 0.01 and a false positive
rate of 0.09. This might lead you to revise your judgment and
conclude that your chance of having the disease is 0.91 rather
than 0.95. This would be true if half the people in your situation
(people who show up for a regular physical exam) had disease
X. The analysis becomes complicated if more or less than half
the people in your situation have Disease X. The proportion
of the people having the disease is called the base
rate.
Assume that Disease X is a rare disease, and only
2% of people in your situation have it. How does that affect the
probability that you have it? Or, more generally, what is the
probability that someone who tests positive actually has the disease.
Lets consider what would happen if one million people were tested.
Out of these one million people, 2% or 20,000 people would have
the disease. Of these 20,000 with the disease, the test would
accurately detect it in 99% of them. This means that 19,800 cases
would be accurately identified. Now lets consider the 98% of the
one million people (980,000) who do not have the disease. Since
the false positive rate is 0.09, 9% of these 980,000 people will
test positive for the disease. This is a total of 88,200 people
incorrectly diagnosed.
To sum up, 19,800 people who tested positive would
actually have the disease and 88,200 people who tested positive
would not have the disease. This means that of all those who tested
positive, only
19,800/(19,800 + 88,200) = 0.1833
of them would actually have the disease. So the
probability that you have the disease is not 0.95, or 0.91, but
only 0.1833.
These results are summarized in Table 1. The numbers
of people diagnosed with the disease are shown in red. Of the
one million people tested, the test was correct for 891,000 of
those without the disease and for 19,800 with the disease; the
test was correct 91% of the time. However, if you look only at
the people testing positive (shown in red), only 19,800 (0.1833)
of the 88,200 + 19,800 = 108,000 testing positive actually have the disease.
Bayes' Theorem
This same result can be obtained using Bayes'
theorem. Bayes' theorem considers both the prior
probability of an event and the diagnostic value of a test
to determine the posterior
probability of the event. For the current example, the event
is that you have Disease X. Let's call this Event D. Since only
2% of people in your situation have Disease X, the prior probability
of Event D is 0.02. Or, more formally, P(D) = 0.02. If D' represents
the probability that Event D is false, then P(D') = 1 - P(D) =
0.98.
To define the diagnostic value of the test, we need
to define another event: that you test positive for Disease X.
Let's call this event T. The diagnostic value of the test depends
on the probability you will test positive given that you actually
have the disease, written as P(T|D), and the probability you test
positive given that you do not have the disease, written as P(T|D').
Bayes' theorem shown below allows you to calculate P(D|T), the
probability that you have the disease given that you test positive
for it.
The various terms are:
P(T|D) = 0.99
P(T|D') = 0.09
P(D) = 0.02
P(D') = 0.98
Therefore,
which is the same value computed previously.
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