Question

stating why false negative matters to you stating why false positive matters to you

Answer 1

When testing hypothesis, the researcher may commit mistakes. False negative is a type of error when the researcher rejects the null hypothesis which was true. For example, a patient provided blood sample to test diabetes. In the case of false negative, the report will show that the patient does not have diabetes, but in reality the person has diabetes. In such condition, the doctor will not recommend any medicines, and the patient will suffer.

For any researcher or student, understanding false negative is important. The concept is applicable in quality control, medical screening, security and antivirus software application. A false negative can impact the results at large. For instance, in quality control false negative means, the quality of the product is good but the customers rejected the products. When customers reject good quality products, it is the loss of customers as well as producers. In the case of antivirus software application, false negative means the software will not detect the virus in the file that really contains virus.

One false negative stops further investigation in the research, so it is important for a researcher to be careful with false negatives. Consider the example of diabetes case. Due to false negative, the doctor did not provide medication and will not ask the patient to test further after some days. In the case of rejection of better quality, the customers will not try once again to check the quality, while in the case of antivirus software, the virus will enter the system and corrupt the system.