Sunday, February 8, 2009

Convicting the innocent

I always use the comparison to a criminal trial when I discuss the logic of hypothesis testing. When we are making decisions with partial information, we can make two types of error: rejecting a claim when it is true, or accepting a claim when it is false. Finding a guilty person innocent is the first, and finding an innocent person guilty is the second. I found an excellent post illustrating the second here.

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