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Spectrum bias arises from evaluating diagnostic tests on biased patient samples, leading to an overestimate of the sensitivity and specificity of the test. For example, a high prevalence of disease in a study population increases positive predictive values, which will cause a bias between the prediction values and the real ones.
Testing a hypothesis suggested by the data can very easily result in false positives (type I errors). If one looks long enough and in enough different places, eventually data can be found to support any hypothesis. Yet, these positive data do not by themselves constitute evidence that the hypothesis is correct. The negative test data that were ...
Sampling bias is problematic because it is possible that a statistic computed of the sample is systematically erroneous. Sampling bias can lead to a systematic over- or under-estimation of the corresponding parameter in the population. Sampling bias occurs in practice as it is practically impossible to ensure perfect randomness in sampling.
In this sense, errors occurring in the process of gathering the sample or cohort cause sampling bias, while errors in any process thereafter cause selection bias. Examples of sampling bias include self-selection, pre-screening of trial participants, discounting trial subjects/tests that did not run to completion and migration bias by excluding ...
In statistical hypothesis testing, a uniformly most powerful (UMP) test is a hypothesis test which has the greatest power among all possible tests of a given size α. For example, according to the Neyman–Pearson lemma , the likelihood-ratio test is UMP for testing simple (point) hypotheses.
False positives and false negatives can be described by the statistical concepts of type I and type II errors, respectively, where the null hypothesis is that the patient will test negative. The precision of a medical test is usually calculated in the form of positive predictive values (PPVs) and negative predicted values (NPVs) .
Bias is a distinct concept from consistency: consistent estimators converge in probability to the true value of the parameter, but may be biased or unbiased (see bias versus consistency for more). All else being equal, an unbiased estimator is preferable to a biased estimator, although in practice, biased estimators (with generally small bias ...
An example of how observer bias can impact on research, and how blinded protocols can impact, can be seen in the trial for an anti-psychotic drug. Researchers that know which of the subjects received the placebo and those that received the trial drugs may later report that the group that received the trial drugs had a calmer disposition, due to ...