pri·or prob·a·bil·i·ty

the best rational assessment of the probability of an outcome on the basis of established knowledge before the present experiment is performed. For instance, the prior probability of the daughter of a carrier of hemophilia being herself a carrier of hemophilia is 1/2. But if the daughter already has an affected son, the posterior probability that she is a carrier is unity, whereas if she has a normal child, the posterior probability that she is a carrier is 1/3. See: Bayes theorem.

Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary © Farlex 2012

prevalence

Epidemiology
(1) The number of people with a specific condition or attribute at a specified time divided by the total number of people in the population.
(2) The number or proportion of cases, events or conditions in a given population.

Statistics
A term defined in the context of a 4-cell diagnostic matrix (2 X 2 table) as the amount of people with a disease, X, relative to a population.

Veterinary medicine
(1) A clinical estimate of the probability that an animal has a given disease, based on current knowledge (e.g., by history of physical exam) before diagnostic testing.
(2) As defined in a population, the probability at a specific point in time that an animal randomly selected from a group will have a particular condition, which is equivalent to the proportion of individuals in the group that have the disease. Group prevalence is calculated by dividing the number of individuals in a group that have a disease by the total number of individuals in the group at risk of the disease. Prevalence is a good measure of the amount of a chronic, low-mortality disease in a population, but is not of the amount of short duration or high-fatality disease. Prevalence is often established by cross-sectional surveys.

prior probability

Decision making The likelihood that something may occur or be associated with an event based on its prevalence in a particular situation. See Medical mistake, Representative heurisic.

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References in periodicals archive

As in the source attribution example above, the set of sources with positive prior probability forms the relevant population for the DM.

Likelihood Ratio as Weight of Forensic Evidence: A Closer Look

starting point or prior probability for the likelihood that a specific

The rule of probabilities: a practical approach for applying Bayes' rule to the analysis of DNA evidence

As is common for Bayesian binomial analysis, this calculator has a beta distribution for the prior probability and requires that the two beta parameters be specified.

Beware of inferential errors and low power with Bayesian analyses: power analysis is needed for confirmatory research/Attention aux erreurs inferentielles etaux faibles puissances dans les analyses bayesiennes: l'analyse de puissance est necessaire pour la recherche confirmatoire/Vorsicht vor inferenzfehlern und geringer teststarke bei bayesschen analysen: eine analyse der teststarke wird bei bestatigungsforschung benotigt ..

Determining this quantity requires assigning appropriate functional forms for the two input quantities for Bayesian inference: (1) the prior probability p(d | I) and (2) the likelihood function p(d | [theta],1).

Bayesian inference for source reconstruction: a real-world application

where the prior probability density function in RGB channels are independent of the randomness of noise distribution.

A Bayesian framework for single image dehazing considering noise

where [M.sub.ij] is the cost of deciding H when the ground truth is [H.sub.j] and P([H.sub.j]) is the prior probability of the ground truth [H.sub.j].

Exploiting optimal threshold for decision fusion in wireless sensor networks

The prior probability of service node determines the probability that an error occurs in a service node by historical data.

Exception detection for web service composition using improved Bayesian network

A Bayesian analysis of whether your partner is cheating on you requires a hypothesis (cheating), an alternative hypothesis or reason why the underwear would be there, and a prior probability you would have assigned to the cheating hypothesis before finding the underwear.

Predicting the future is hard: building better models, from elections to financial markets

where P([[omega].sub.1]) the prior probability of [[omega].sub.1], [P.sub.n,i]([[[upsilon].sup.i.sub.n](t)) the prior probability of [[[upsilon].sup.i.sub.n](t), and the values for both of them are hard to decide.

Sparse time-frequency representation based feature extraction method for landmine discrimination