Statistics

Sensitivity and Specificity Calculator

Calculate sensitivity and specificity from a confusion matrix.


Sensitivity and Specificity Calculator

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Find sensitivity and specificity — the two standard statistics for evaluating how well a binary test or classifier distinguishes positive from negative cases.

How it works

Sensitivity (true positive rate) is TP ÷ (TP + FN); specificity (true negative rate) is TN ÷ (TN + FP). With 90 true positives and 10 false negatives, sensitivity is 90%; with 80 true negatives and 20 false positives, specificity is 80%.

What this does not include

This is a statistics formula for evaluating a classifier or test’s performance characteristics — it does not diagnose anything itself, and interpreting what a specific sensitivity/specificity pair means for any individual result requires additional context this calculator doesn’t provide.

How to use this calculator

  1. Enter the counts of true positives, false negatives, true negatives, and false positives.

What’s the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity?

Adjusting a test’s decision threshold typically raises one at the expense of the other — a more sensitive test catches more true positives but also flags more false positives, lowering specificity.

Why do both matter, rather than just overall accuracy?

A test can have high overall accuracy while performing terribly on the class that actually matters — for example, if positives are rare, a test that always predicts “negative” can have high accuracy but zero sensitivity.

What does 100% sensitivity mean?

Every actual positive case was correctly identified — no false negatives at all, though this says nothing on its own about how many false positives the test also produced.

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Written by

J. Adeyemi

Statistics writer

J. Adeyemi writes the statistics and probability calculators, from descriptive summaries through to distributions and conditional probability. The recurring theme is scope: each page states precisely which question it answers, because most statistical mistakes come from applying a correct formula to the wrong question. Related-but-different measures get separate pages rather than being quietly merged.

Reviewed by

K. Novak

Calculator reviewer — statistics

K. Novak reviews the statistics and probability calculators, checking formula correctness and the scope boundary each page draws around itself. Closely related measures are routinely confused with one another, so review confirms that a page computing one of them says clearly that it is not computing the others.

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