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Imagine you are give the following problem:

  • There is a 50% chance of diagnosing an illness correctly as "Known" instead of "Unknown".
  • There is a 50% that available treatments "Control" the "Known" illness (and 50% they do not,lets us "Chaos" as a label for out of control)

What are the chances the patient has an "Unknown" illness that is out of control (in “Chaos”)

Initially I thought I could solve it with this code:

cause = CategoricalDistribution[{"Known", "Unknown"}, {1/2, 1/2}]
control = CategoricalDistribution[{"Control", "Chaos"}, {1/2, 1/2}]    
Probability[ ca == "Unknown" &&  co == "Chaos" , {ca \[Distributed] cause, co \[Distributed] control} ]

Which results in the answer $\frac{1}{4}$ (0.25)

But then I realized that is only if probability of pick a treatment that "Controls" condition is independent of probability of "Known" condition, which feels intuitively wrong.

How can I tell Mathematica that if the illness is "Known" the probability to "Control" it should be higher, say: 60%, and if the illness is “Unknown" the probability to "Control" it is lower (say "40%") ?

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Turns out that it can be done by using CategoricalDistribution multivariate support. I just have to change the code to be:

causecontrol = CategoricalDistribution[{{"Known", "Unknown"},
   {"Control", "Chaos"}}, {{120, 80}, {80, 120}}]

and then:

Probability[
 ca == "Unknown" &&  cp == "Chaos"  , {ca, cp} \[Distributed] 
  causecontrol]

gets me a $\frac{3}{10}$ (.3) answer. This made me realize what I am actually trying to get is c=="Unknown" conditional on cp=="Chaos"

Unfortunately while that works in the univariate mode:

Probability[ 
 Conditioned[ca == "Unknown" ,    
  co == "Chaos" ], {ca \[Distributed] cause, 
  co \[Distributed] control} ]

Resulting in answer $\frac{1}{2}$

It returns an unevaluated expression under multivariate setting:

Probability[ 
 Conditioned[ca == "Unknown" ,  
  cp == "Chaos"  ] , {ca, cp} \[Distributed] causecontrol]

I tried it on Mathematica Online, and it seems I am being hit by this bug, but other than that, the approach is correct.

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