false negative

plural false negatives

1. A result of a test that shows as absent something that is present.

   While a false positive from a cancer screening test will unnecessarily frighten a healthy person, a false negative will deprive them of timely treatment.

   5 more examples

   Nature has three great stages, through which she carries each and all: there is first a false affirmative, then a false negative; then there is the combining doctrine, which destroys the error by destroying the partiality and exclusiveness of both.

   1835 February 7, “System of Nature”, in J[ames] E[lishama] Smith, editor, The Shepherd, number 24, London: Printed and published by B. D. Cousins, […], →OCLC, page 187, column 1

   It may well be asked, what is a man to believe, when we find ministers and laymen, those who ought to be at once Christians and gentlemen, giving currency to statements so daring and unfounded as those which I am combating; and aiding and abetting each other in attempts to prove a false negative, by feigning ignorance!

   1862, A[braham] Hume, “Migration of Chapels in Liverpool”, in The Church of England the Home Missionary to the Poor, Especially in Our Large Towns. […], London: Seeley, Jackson, & Halliday, […]; Liverpool: Adam Holden; Manchester: Sowler & Sons, →OCLC, page 19

   A is highly screening for B when the percentage of false negatives is small. It should be noted that a test which is highly specific for B may or may not have a large percentage of false negatives, […]

   1958, The Chicago Medical School Quarterly, volumes 19–20, Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Medical School, →ISSN, →OCLC

   [I]t is critical that the system accurately detects and displays the sensors that are exposed to the weights of products. Errors occur when completely or partly covered sensors do not report a load (false negatives) or when sensors show the detection of a product even though they are not loaded (false positives).

   2007, Christian Metzger, Jan Meyer, Elgar Fleisch, Gerhard Tröster, “Weight-sensitive Foam to Monitor Product Availability on Retail Shelves”, in Anthony LaMarca, Marc Langheinrich, Khai N. Truong, editors, Pervasive Computing: […] (LNCS; 4480), Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, →ISBN, →ISSN, pages 275–276

   There are two types of catch trials: false positive and false negative. […] False-negative catch trials are meant to determine if a subject has fallen asleep or has an otherwise reduced ability to respond during a test. If a subject misses a brighter stimulus than has previously been seen, it is assumed that this represents a bona fide false-negative catch trial.

   2015, Michael Wall, “Choice and Interpretation of Visual Field Testing”, in Leonard A. Levin, Anthony C. Arnold, editors, Neuro-ophthalmology: The Practical Guide, New York, N.Y.: Thieme Medical Publishers, →ISBN, section I (The Neuro-ophthalmic Examination), page 25, column 2

2. mathematicsA type II error (“accepting the null hypothesis when it is false”).

   Statisticians sometimes refer to false negative results as Type II errors. Type II errors cannot be controlled explicitly, but are controlled implicitly via the experimental design.

   2003, Dov Stekel, “Experimental Design”, in Microarray Bioinformatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 222

   Synonyms: FN