Question Details

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).

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Correct Answer :

0.77

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 D be the event that a person has the disease, and D 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: P(D)=30%=0.30
- Probability of not having the disease: P(D)=1-P(D)=0.70
- Probability of testing positive given that the person has the disease (true positive rate): P(+|D)=80%=0.80
- Probability of testing positive given that the person does not have the disease (false positive rate): P(+|D)=10%=0.10

We want to find the conditional probability P(D|+), which is the probability that the person suffers from the disease given that they tested positive. According to Bayes' Theorem:

P(D|+)=P(+|D)·P(D)P(+|D)·P(D)+P(+|D)·P(D)

First, we calculate the total probability of testing positive, which is the denominator of the Bayes' Theorem formula:
P(+)=(0.80·0.30)+(0.10·0.70)
P(+)=0.24+0.07=0.31

Now, we substitute this back into Bayes' Theorem to find P(D|+):
P(D|+)=0.240.31
P(D|+)0.77419

Rounding to 2 decimal places, we get:
P(D|+)0.77

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