Well, depends. It’s bayes law fucking us over with the vast majority of people not having breast cancer but really, really needing to know if they do. This is

Well, depends. It’s bayes law fucking us over with the vast majority of people not having breast cancer but really, really needing to know if they do. This is why it’s better to have tiers of confidence for actual policy decisions and not just confusion matrix results frankly. Like if you run this test and you’re in a cohort that is 99.999% likely to be cancer, that’s useful info. It’s not a problem, per se, if the test instead comes back with an answer of mixed certainty. We just need to be comfortable with getting neither a positive nor a negative prediction; nor expecting it to cover all cases. The policy driving thresholds on tests need to consider the weights of each possible outcome to determine what to do.