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 worried state, drives really fast to reach home, only to see the father peacefully sitting in the easychair reading the newspaper.
This is usually harmless, but in one case, this crying wolf nature of false positives becomes life threatening. For intelligence agencies, the problem is not lack of information but abundance of information. They hear about too many threats of attacks and sabotage, most of them fake. It becomes hard to identify the genuine ones. We read the stories of how the intelligence agencies had information about 9/11, 26/11 and other terrorist attacks. In many of these cases, it was the false positives that prevented timely action and took so many lives.
datascience
decisionintelligence
frauddetection
By Devesh Rajadhyax
Co-Founder, Cere Labs
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