Thursday 4 July 2013

Biostatistics 1

Karl Pearson founded the journal "Biometrika" 110 years ago, and laid the foundation for today's classical biostatistics (chi-square test, hypothesis testing, correlation, more).  His political views, even for the times, were unsavory (a proponent of eugenics, he advocated "war against the inferior races"), but his statistical contributions remain embedded in the technical and pedagogical literature.  Statistics.com offers a two-course online sequence in Biostatistics, starting with Biostatistics 1 and Biostatistics 2. Each course is 4 weeks long, and taught by Prof. Abhaya Indrayan, co-author of "Medical Biostatistics." For more details please visit at Biostatistics 1.

"Biostatistics 1" covers sensitivity-specificity and predictive values of medical tests, confidence intervals, medical vs. statistical significance, and chi-square, Student's t and ANOVA F-tests, including multiple comparisons.

Who Should Take This Course:
This non-mathematical course is specially designed for medical and health professionals who deal with medical data and want to acquire some statistical skills. These include nursing, pharmacy, laboratory technology and nutrition professionals beside physicians, surgeons and dentists.

Course Program:

Course outline: The course is structured as follows

SESSION 1: Probability in Health and Medicine
  • Medical uncertainties and probability
  • Elementary laws of probability
  • Bayes' Rule
  • Sensitivity-specificity of a medical test
  • Positive and negative predictive value
  • Effect of prevalence

SESSION 2: Confidence Intervals
  • Sampling distributions and SEs
  • Large sample CI for one-sample mean and proportion
  • Exact CI for proportion and median
  • Large sample CI for differences between means and proportions
  • Sample size for estimation

SESSION 3: Statistical vs. Medical Significance
  • P-value and level of significance
  • The concept of statistical power
  • Medical vs. statistical significance
  • Sample size for significance and power analysis
  • Chi-square test for simple situations

SESSION 4: Some Statistical Tests for Quantitative Data
  • Student's t-test for one-sample and two-sample situations
  • ANOVA for one-way and two-way tables
  • Tukey test and Bonferroni procedures for multiple comparisons
  • Test for medically significant gain and equivalence test

Dr. Abhaya Indrayan, in addition to authoring "Medical Biostatistics," (2nd ed., CRC Press), has also written a book on medical research methods.  He is Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the College of Medical Sciences, University of Delhi, and frequently provides biostatistical Consultation to the World Health Organization, the World Bank and UNAIDS.

You will be able to ask questions and exchange comments with the instructors via a private discussion board throughout the course.   The courses take place online at statistics.com in a series of 4 weekly lessons and assignments, and require about 15 hours/week.  Participate at your own convenience; there are no set times when you must be online. You have the flexibility to work a bit every day, if that is your preference, or concentrate your work in just a couple of days.

For Indian participants statistics.com accepts registration for its courses at special prices in Indian Rupees through its partner, the Center for eLearning and Training (C-eLT), Pune.

For India Registration and pricing, please visit us at www.india.statistics.com.

Call: 020 66009116

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