Can false positives be life threatening?
Usually, it is the false negatives that are associated with risk to life. Consider the case of a medical test for a serious disease. You don’t want the test to miss the disease in a patient. The test might flag the disease even when it is not there. This is bad but not so disastrous as missing it. In other words, false negatives (missing the disease) are life threatening, but false positives (predicting disease that is not there) are not. This is generally true, even in applications that are not life threatening but are still damaging. Take the example of fraud detection. False positives (signaling fraud by mistake) is alright but false negatives (missing a fraud) is not. The major problem with false positives is their nuisance. An interesting case is that of the fall detection device for elderly people. This device sends emergency messages to close relatives when a senior person falls down. Sometimes, it signals a fall by mistake. The son or daughter leaves the office in a worri...