I was in a statistics class where the Professor was teaching likelihood, then asked if there are cases when we don't want to maximize the likelihood ratio. The

I was in a statistics class where the Professor was teaching likelihood, then asked if there are cases when we don't want to maximize the likelihood ratio. The answer is when you want to put a limitation on false positive (or negative) detection. You wouldn't vet a system that is susceptible to high false negatives and likely to kill people- no matter how good the accuracy is.