How to Use false positive in a Sentence

false positive

noun
Definition of false positivenext
  • If costs and rates of false positives can be reduced, the scans someday may find a place on a list of preventive care recommendations.
    — Lisa Doggett, NPR, 18 June 2024
  • One of the most promising tests has a false positive rate of less than one percent.
    — Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune, 18 June 2024
  • Most of the returns, in other words, are false positives.
    — Eyal Press, The New Yorker, 13 Nov. 2023
  • And a lot of the time, the signatures are really non-unique and there’s going to be a lot of false positives.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 29 May 2024
  • The bug increased the false positive rate from the normal limit of 5 percent to up to 70 percent.
    — Mikkel Krenchel, Foreign Affairs, 25 Aug. 2016
  • Carlos Duarte: There’s a lot of false negatives and a lot of false positives.
    — Joseph Polidoro, Scientific American, 6 Mar. 2023
  • What’s the risk if the model had false positives, or false negatives?
    — Brittany Trang, STAT, 22 May 2023
  • Ten of the brochures never mention that a false positive can happen.
    — New York Times, 1 Jan. 2022
  • There is always the chance that the test will reveal a false positive or negative.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, Health, 26 July 2023
  • The fact the sub was going to explore the wreckage of the Titanic also means there may be lots of false positives on any sonar scans.
    — WIRED, 20 June 2023
  • Those are the various false positives and false negatives that would be part of the risk model.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes, 29 Feb. 2024
  • Though their tests were later revealed to be false positives.
    — Kimberlee Speakman, Peoplemag, 12 Dec. 2023
  • For Gal, the benefit of knowing and the cost of monitoring outweighs the risk of false positives.
    — Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes, 10 Feb. 2024
  • Tests with low specificity are more likely to show a false positive.
    — Alyssa Hui, Verywell Health, 22 Jan. 2024
  • The Apple Watch version, along with car crash detection, had led to some false positives, with the watch dialing 911 when the users weren't hurt.
    — Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 28 Feb. 2023
  • If, on the other hand, a test returns positive and the value rises, a false positive is less likely.
    — Mara Buchbinder, STAT, 29 Oct. 2023
  • Luminar will need to make sure that its system isn’t triggered by false positives.
    — Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge, 9 Jan. 2024
  • Research shows that false positives are more common in women age 40 to 49 than in older women.
    — Binghui Huang, The Indianapolis Star, 3 May 2024
  • Your test may have given you a false negative, which are far more common than false positives, experts say.
    — Byerin Prater, Fortune Well, 9 Sep. 2023
  • Users soon decided the detection was a false positive triggered by a glitch in the SentinelOne product.
    — Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 30 Mar. 2023
  • This can cause the AI to give false positives or, worse, ignore attacker intrusion.
    — Carlo Tortora Brayda, Forbes, 17 July 2023
  • There is also the risk of false positive tests driving unnecessary use of health care services.
    — Charlotte Hu, Vox, 4 June 2024
  • If not caught, these can cause false positives: things at first assumed to be real but that can take exhaustive efforts to discover are not.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 15 May 2023
  • It is known to give false positives for other substances, including food fibers and minerals found in household goods such as paint.
    — Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2024
  • All tests carry a risk of false positive or negative results.
    — Jen Christensen, CNN, 24 Feb. 2023
  • This makes these false positives relatively easy to spot.
    — The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 8 Mar. 2023
  • The test had a specificity of 93% for cancer detection, meaning there’s a 7% chance that a patient receives a false positive result.
    — Claire Bugos, Verywell Health, 30 May 2023
  • For example, systems used to evaluate chest X-rays, while able to find anomalies that humans might miss, also have been shown to kick up many more false positives.
    — Paul Sisson, San Diego Union-Tribune, 2 Jan. 2024
  • But officers were worried the dog’s fatigue yielded a false positive.
    — Nicole Asbury, Washington Post, 25 Oct. 2023
  • The benefits of earlier breast cancer detection would balance out any harms from false positives due to the dense breast tissue in this group, the researchers noted.
    — Ambar Castillo, STAT, 19 Apr. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'false positive.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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