4 ms·

> If you are on a jury, remember that it is FAR FAR FAR worse to imprison an innocent person than to let a guilty person free, regardless of the crime This is

• swsieber 10y ago
  Oh my goodness. The whole type I vs type II actually seems a lot less nonsensical now. Thank you.
  • thearn4 10y ago
    It honestly isn't too much more complex than that. The conventional framework for the test of hypotheses (via the neyman-pearson lemma or some slight twist on it) effectively says you should put a hard limit on the dangerous type I errors (alpha), while numerically trying to minimize the less dangerous type II errors. It's certainly not the only way to do this empirically (which is why stats can seem like such a hodgepodge of competing perspectives), but it's the core framework that the hard sciences seemed to settle on in the 20th century. High level math-stats is a cool subject, I think that in some ways machine learning can be seen as picking up at the boundary of these 'traditional' methods. For example, if I don't care to really distinguish between false-positives and false-negatives, then you end up with something that will look more like an SVM than a test of hypotheses.