Clinical Statistics I

Catalog description

This is an introductory course in evidence discovery that demonstrates the concepts and application of statistical techniques/tools, given the role of statistics as an information science. The course is intended to inform and provide quantitative skills for graduate students interested in undertaking research in clinical medicine, epidemiology, public health, translational and biomedical sciences. This course emphasizes the basic dogma of statistics namely the central tendency theorem as well as sampling as the core of statistics. With the characterization of statistics as descriptive and inferential, the descriptive arm of statistics is stressed in this course namely summary statistics. Basic probability concepts are covered to stress the importance of sampling prior to reliable inference from the sample data. Sample estimation of the population and the precision (confidence interval) are described as well as the hypothesis testing notion in inferential statistics. The parametric and non-parametric methods are introduced with the intent to describe the methods as applicable to continuous (ratio, interval, cardinal) and discrete (categorical binary, dichotomous) data.