Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2003/paper-2/5/a/solution

Let denote having the disease and a positive result. Assume I am sampled uniformly from the stated population, so . By the law of total probability, . Thus Bayes' theorem gives
The denominator must be positive; otherwise the observed event has zero probability in this model and the conditional probability is undefined. The answer depends on disease prevalence as well as the test's two error rates.

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