You are in charge of marketing for a website that offers automated medical diagn

Question

You are in charge of marketing for a website that offers automated medical diagnoses. The program will scan the results of routine medical tests (pulse rate, blood pressure, urinalysis, etc.) and either clear the patient or refer the case to a doctor. You are marketing the program for use as part of a preventive-medicine system to screen many thousands of persons who do not have specific medical complaints. The program makes a decision about each patient. The program can be adjusted to decrease one error probability at the cost of an increase in the other error probability. Which error probability should you choose to make smaller?

Explanation / Answer

there are two types of error probabilities. type 1 error and type 2 error.

in this particular case type 1 error is refering a healthy patient to doctor and type 2 error is referring an ill patient as clear.

so the type 2 probability error should be made smaller because considering a healthy patient as ill is not harmful. because further carrying out diagnoses on healthy patient will not make him ill or will not do any harm to him.

but if a ill patient is considered to be healthy and no further treatment is done to him then that is bad for his health. he will get more and more ill which should not be case.

hence type 2 error probability should be minimized

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