To translate the false-positive rate into concrete numbers:
According to the American Cancer Society (http://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreaticcancer/detailedguide/...), about 53,070 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year. The abstract says this method detects 5% to 15% of cases: that's about 2,700 to 8,000 correct detections. Assuming there are 100 million people using Bing (https://www.quantcast.com/bing.com), between 1,000 and 10,000 cases will be wrongly detected (0.00001 to 0.0001 false positive rate).
It wasn't entirely clear from the article, but I assumed that the false positive rate referred to the ratio of people with matching search queries, not of all Bing users. In that case the absolute number of false positives would be much lower.
Also, the detection of 5% to 15% of cases would seem to me to refer to only Bing users; I doubt they're claiming to be able to detect 5-15% of all cases of pancreatic cancer.
Would've been nice if these things were actually spelled out in the article.
It wasn't entirely clear from the article, but I assumed that the false positive rate referred to the ratio of people with matching search queries, not of all Bing users. In that case the absolute number of false positives would be much lower.
If that's true, how did they have enough real positives to measure such a low false positive rate?
Also, the detection of 5% to 15% of cases would seem to me to refer to only Bing users; I doubt they're claiming to be able to detect 5-15% of all cases of pancreatic cancer.
Yeah, I'm being dumb, there's no way that percentage is out of all cases!
According to the American Cancer Society (http://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreaticcancer/detailedguide/...), about 53,070 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year. The abstract says this method detects 5% to 15% of cases: that's about 2,700 to 8,000 correct detections. Assuming there are 100 million people using Bing (https://www.quantcast.com/bing.com), between 1,000 and 10,000 cases will be wrongly detected (0.00001 to 0.0001 false positive rate).