In: Statistics and Probability
Use the tree diagram technique that can be found in Lecture 12 to solve this problem. Suppose that 50% of all people who take a pregnancy test are, in fact, pregnant. A certain pregnancy test is known to identify 95% of pregnancies with a positive test result. However, 2% of people who are not pregnant will have a positive test result.
Find the following probabilities:
a. What is the probability that someone is pregnant and tests positive?
b. What is the overall probability of a positive test result?
c. If a woman has a positive test result, what is the probability that she is actually pregnant?
a) P(pregnant and test positive) = P(test positive | pregnant) * P(pregnant)
= 0.95 * 0.50 = 0.475
b) P(Positive test) = P(positive | pregnant) * P(pregnant) + P(positive | not pregnant) * P(not pregnant)
= 0.95 * 0.50 + 0.02 * (1 - 0.50)
= 0.485
c) P(pregnant | positive) = P(positive | pregnant) * P(pregnant)/P(positive)
= (0.95 * 0.50)/0.485
= 0.9794