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cesine edited this page Apr 13, 2011 · 3 revisions

Table of Contents

Validity in General

  • true positives
  • false positives
  • true negatives
  • false negatives
  • actual positives (true positives + false negatives)
  • actual negatives (true negatives + false positives)

Validity in Medicine

Medicine is more concerned with high accuracy of the negative test results.

  • Sensitivity refers to the probability that a diagnostic technique will detect a particular disease or condition when it does indeed exist in a patient (National Multiple Sclerosis Society). A measure with high sensitivity is sensitive to the existence of the condition, and will avoid false negatives and avoid delayed treatment.
  • Specificity refers to the probability that a diagnostic technique will indicate a negative test result when the condition is absent (true negative). A measure with high specificity can be used to eliminate candidate diseases/conditions.

Validity in Information Retrieval

Information retrieval is more concerned with high accuracy of the returned (positive) results.

  • Precision (true positives/returned positives) is defined as the number of relevant documents retrieved by a search divided by the total number of documents retrieved by that search. Precision is a measure of correctness, in the context of a final disease diagnosis or final search result few false positives (high precision) is preferred.
  • Recall (true positives/actual positives) is defined as the number of relevant documents retrieved by a search divided by the total number of existing relevant documents. Recall is a measure of completeness, in the context of early disease testing or a first pass search, few false negatives (high recall) is preferred.
  • F-score is a weighted average of accuracy which simply combines the measures of precision and recall. ( precision * recall) / ( precision + recall)

Validity Measures

  • apply in conjunction with known tests or tools (to achieve the "actual" values)

Validity Loss

  • repeated use of the same screening tool with the same client often reduces its validity
    • it is advised that some screening tools not be used repeatedly with the same individual if the time interval between testing is short.
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