Saturday, November 8, 2014

Probability Trees and Marginal Distributions



In a blog post earlier this year about medical screening, On the hazards of significance testing. Part 1: the screening problem, statistical expert David Colquhoun demonstrates a simple way of visualizing the structure of certain probabilistic problems. This diagram, which we might call a probability tree, makes the sometimes counter-intuitive solutions to such problems far more easy to grasp (and in the process, helps put over-inflated claims about the effectiveness of screening into perspective).