Читать книгу Applied Biostatistics for the Health Sciences - Richard J. Rossi - Страница 11

The special features of this book include the following:

 The importance of using/designing well-designed sampling plans is heavily emphasized throughout this text.

 Concepts are emphasized over computational formulas throughout this text.

 Several topics that are not usually covered in a first course in biostatistics are included in Applied Biostatistics for the Health Sciences, such as bootstrapping, sampling, sample size computations for two-sample confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, design of experiments, and survival analysis.

 A large number of the examples are based on real-life studies published in biomedical and healthcare journals.

 Bivariate data and bivariate analyses are presented early in the text. In particular, correlation, simple linear regression, and contingency tables are all introduced in Chapter 4.

 Logistic regression follows immediately after a discussion of linear regression, which seems natural.

 References are given to difficult problems that often occur when building and assessing a statistical model.

I have written this textbook with the expectation that access to a statistical computing package will be available to the students, and thus, the emphasis of this text is placed on the correct use, interpretation, and drawing statistical inferences from the output provided by a statistical computing package rather than the computational aspects required of the statistical methodology. While MINITAB® was used to produce the plots and computer output throughout the text, an introductory biostatistics course can be taught from Applied Biostatistics for the Health Sciences using any of the commonly used statistical computing packages, SAS, STATA, and SPSS or open source software such as R. The vast majority of the exercises do not depend on the particular statistical computing package being used, and in fact, many of the exercises do not require a statistical computing package at all. I have also created several Microsoft® Office Excel® worksheets for Applied Biostatistics for the Health Sciences that can be used for determining sample sizes, computing confidence intervals, and computing test statistics and p-values that are available on the book’s website.