Suppose you\'re given the following information: A truth serum given to a suspec

Question

Suppose you're given the following information:
A truth serum given to a suspect is known to be 90% reliable when the person is guilty and 99% reliable when the person is innocent. If the suspect was selected from a group of suspects of which only 5% have ever committed a crime, and the serum indicates that he is guilty, what is the probability that he is innocent?


1. As you read that prompt, what is your approach to dissecting this problem? What are the keywords or strategies you use to understand what is being said and how you might tackle the problem? You do not need to solve the problem or even know how to solve the problem, I just want us to focus on breaking down and understanding what information was given and what an approach is to understanding it.

Explanation / Answer

Here to solve this practical life problem, we are given some facts based on which we will solve it. Our basic approach is to segreggate the data given and than managae if give the final answer. Here the question asked us to the find the probability that a person is innocent even if serum indicates that he is guilty.

So, our first approach is to find out number of case where serum indicates a guy guilty of crime

1. A person is innocent but truth serum wrongly found out that guy is guilty of crime

2. A person if criminal and truth serum correctly found out that guy is guilty of crime.

As number of criminal in the population is very low i.e. 5%. So, there is high chance that an innocent person can be found as guilty even there is none.

So as we will find out that how many people the truth serum found out as a guilty as per given two options. We will seclude the option 1(as it is the option we desire to calculate) and then do the basid math to solve this problem.

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