Being Careful About Base Rates

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Abstract

We have seen that using a test for medical diagnosis requires that we distinguish two quite distinct sources of information: the characteristics of the test and the characteristics of the patient. Test characteristics are measured by likelihoods found by testing and experiment. Patient characteristics are found from data which describe the prevalence of a condition in the population and described as base rates. These are brought together in Bayes’ Rule

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Jessop, A. (2018). Being Careful About Base Rates. In: Let the Evidence Speak. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71392-2_10

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