a simple question about probabilty

Question posted in Banking, Computer Software, Financial Services, Healthcare Services on 08 2009
Rate question difficulty level 2 Votes

researchers are testing a group of 1000 patients for the existance of a certain disease with a normal appearance of 10%, the accuracy of of the test is 95%. a patient was tested and had been found positive, what are the odds that he suffers from the disease


for the financial sector a bonus is to actually know the source of this question - which is a research of Kahneman and Tversky described in "Fooled by randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
 
 
1 Answer
 
roi

most people tested for this question gave the wrong answer of 95% while the real answer is
%.
the group of 1000 people is considered healthy hence : 1000 divided by the possibility of being sick (10%) and by the error rate (5%)  = 20 which is 2% of the base 1000.


08/13/2009
 
 
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