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Fecal occult blood testing (FOBT), as its name implies, aims to detect subtle blood loss in the gastrointestinal tract, anywhere from the mouth to the colon.Positive tests ("positive stool") may result from either upper gastrointestinal bleeding or lower gastrointestinal bleeding and warrant further investigation for peptic ulcers or a malignancy (such as colorectal cancer or gastric cancer).
The positive predictive value (PPV), or precision, is defined as = + = where a "true positive" is the event that the test makes a positive prediction, and the subject has a positive result under the gold standard, and a "false positive" is the event that the test makes a positive prediction, and the subject has a negative result under the gold standard.
Pre-test probability and post-test probability (alternatively spelled pretest and posttest probability) are the probabilities of the presence of a condition (such as a disease) before and after a diagnostic test, respectively. Post-test probability, in turn, can be positive or negative, depending on whether the test falls out as a positive test ...
In evidence-based medicine, likelihood ratios are used for assessing the value of performing a diagnostic test. They use the sensitivity and specificity of the test to determine whether a test result usefully changes the probability that a condition (such as a disease state) exists. The first description of the use of likelihood ratios for ...
The Pareto distribution, named after the Italian civil engineer, economist, and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, [2] is a power-law probability distribution that is used in description of social, quality control, scientific, geophysical, actuarial, and many other types of observable phenomena; the principle originally applied to describing the distribution of wealth in a society, fitting the trend ...
considered as a function of , is the likelihood function, given the outcome of the random variable . Sometimes the probability of "the value of for the parameter value " is written as P(X = x | θ) or P(X = x; θ). The likelihood is the probability that a particular outcome is observed when the true value of the parameter is , equivalent to the ...
Newton's method in optimization. A comparison of gradient descent (green) and Newton's method (red) for minimizing a function (with small step sizes). Newton's method uses curvature information (i.e. the second derivative) to take a more direct route. In calculus, Newton's method (also called Newton–Raphson) is an iterative method for finding ...
Mathematically, positive feedback is defined as a positive loop gain around a closed loop of cause and effect. [1][3] That is, positive feedback is in phase with the input, in the sense that it adds to make the input larger. [4][5] Positive feedback tends to cause system instability. When the loop gain is positive and above 1, there will ...