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Is Frequentist Testing Vulnerable to the Base-Rate Fallacy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Aris Spanos
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This article calls into question the charge that frequentist testing is susceptible to the base-rate fallacy. It is argued that the apparent similarity between examples like the Harvard Medical School test and frequentist testing is highly misleading. A closer scrutiny reveals that such examples have none of the basic features of a proper frequentist test, such as legitimate data, hypotheses, test statistics, and sampling distributions. Indeed, the relevant error probabilities are replaced with the false positive/negative rates that constitute deductive calculations based on known probabilities among events. As a result, the ampliative dimension of frequentist induction—learning from data about the underlying data-generating mechanism—is missing.

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Research Article
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 565 - 583
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Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Stathis Psillos for encouraging me to focus on this problem and two anonymous referees whose constructive comments and suggestions helped to improve the article.

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