Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by manthideaal 2279 days ago
TP + FN means true positives plus false negatives, that is the number of deseased people. P should be the number of people that gives positive in the test, since TP means true positive in that sense.

Also TP + FN = Prevalence of the desease, but using P for prevalence and for positive creates a lot of confusion in a wikipedia page to explain a concept.

My plea is that I don't want people to get confused. On top of it there is a warning on that page of wikipedia: This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. I couldn't understand why they used that notation. So I ask to delete that page because is going to confuse people.

2 comments

> Also TP + FN = Prevalence of the d[i]sease, but using P for prevalence and for positive creates a lot of confusion

Nobody's using P for prevalence. It's being used for positive. Take a look at the table.

> that is the number of d[i]seased people

Yes, that is what "positive" means. (In the context of a test for disease.)

That Wikipedia page has a corresponding "Talk" page. Go discuss it there.