Test which detects true negative is said to have: March 2005
Ans. D: Specificity Concept of sensitivity and specificity can be understood as follows: Imagine a study evaluating a new test that screens people for a disease. Each person taking the test either has or does not have the disease. The test outcome can be positive (predicting that the person has the disease) or negative (predicting that the person does not have the disease). The test results for each subject may or may not match the subject's actual status. In that setting: True positive: Sick people correctly diagnosed as sick False positive: Healthy people incorrectly identified as sick True negative: Healthy people correctly identified as healthy False negative: Sick people incorrectly identified as healthy. Specificity A specificity of 100% means that the test recognizes all actual/true negatives - for example, all healthy people will be recognized as healthy. Because 100% specificity means no positives are erroneously tagged, a positive result in a high specificity test is used to confirm the disease. The maximum can trilly be achieved by a test that claims everybody healthy regardless of the true condition. Therefore, the specificity alone does not tell us how well the test recognizes positive cases. We also need to know the sensitivity of the test. A test with a high specificity has a low type I error rate. Sensitivity A sensitivity of 100% means that the test recognizes all actual positives - for example, all sick people are recognized as being ill. Thus, in contrast to a high specificity test, negative results in a high sensitivity test are used to rule out the disease. Sensitivity alone does not tell us how well the test predicts other classes (that is, about the negative cases).
Relative risk
Odd's ratio
Sensitivity
Specificity