Probabilities (General)

by romansh , Friday, April 18, 2014, 01:53 (3653 days ago) @ David Turell

I admit to knowing litle about statistics, even though I cooked-booked some results for papers that were published, simple T and P values, occasional chi- square..-That is fair enough David.-Apparently most doctors surveyed are not that familiar either.-The piece of information missing is the incidence of the ailment in the relevant population. -If the good doctor would go on and explain that the incidence of the ailment in "my" population was say one in a thousand then we can calculate what my chances of suffering from said ailment.-Say we took a thousand people (representative of the population) we would expect, on average, one real positive and fifty false postives. -So my actual chances of suffering from said ailment are about one in fifty or two percent and not the ninety five percent I had originally calculated. Obviously the numbers will vary with the type of ailment and test.