A clinic specializes in testing for a Disease D. The result of the test can be either positive (+ve) or negative (-ve). A study reveals that if a person suffers from the Disease D, the test result in that clinic comes up +ve 80% of the time and negative 20% of the time. If a person is not suffering from the Disease D, the test comes out positive 10% of the time & negative 90% of the time. It is also known among the general population the disease D occurs in 30% of the individuals. If the person tests positive for D in that clinic, the probability that he/she actually suffers from the Disease D is_____(Round off to 2 decimal places).
Correct Answer :
Solution :
The correct answer is 0.77.
To find the probability that a person actually suffers from Disease D given that they tested positive, we can apply Bayes' Theorem. Let us first define the events and their given probabilities:
- Let be the event that a person has the disease, and be the event that they do not have the disease.
- Let be the event that the test result is positive.
- Let be the event that the test result is negative.
From the problem statement, we have the following probabilities:
- Probability of having the disease:
- Probability of not having the disease:
- Probability of testing positive given that the person has the disease (true positive rate):
- Probability of testing positive given that the person does not have the disease (false positive rate):
We want to find the conditional probability , which is the probability that the person suffers from the disease given that they tested positive. According to Bayes' Theorem:
First, we calculate the total probability of testing positive, which is the denominator of the Bayes' Theorem formula:
Now, we substitute this back into Bayes' Theorem to find :
Rounding to 2 decimal places, we get:
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