Biostatistics For Dummies ) PDF

Rating: (20 reviews) Author: Pezzullo ISBN : 9781118553985 New from $20.69 Format: PDF

Direct download links available PRETITLE Biostatistics For Dummies ) POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link

From the Back Cover

Learn to:

• Understand key statistical concepts as they relate to biological sciences
• Interpret biological and statistical data in any setting
• Score your highest in your biostatistics course

Baffled by biostatistics?

Biostatisticians are charged with finding answers to some of the world's most pressing health questions: How safe or effective are drugs hitting the market today? What causes autism? What are the risk factors for cardiovascular disease? Covering the most relevant topics you'll encounter in a biostatistics course, Biostatistics For Dummies gives you plain-English explanations of important concepts and plenty of examples.

• Back to the basics — get up to speed on math and statistics concepts, find advice on selecting statistical software, and get an overview of clinical research
• The deal with data — find out how to collect data properly, summarize it concisely, display it in tables and graphs, and describe its qualities
• Size it up — grasp the most common statistical techniques for comparing groups: t tests, ANOVAs, chi-square tests, and Fisher Exact tests
• Let's regress — learn how to test for and quantify the relationship between two or more variables, from a simple straight-line regression to multiple, logistic, nonlinear, and other kinds of regression
• Survive and thrive — see how to calculate survival curves, test for a difference in survival between two or more groups of subjects, and apply the methods of regression analysis to survival data

Open the book and find:

• Basic math and statistical formulas, concepts, and techniques you need to know
• The big picture of clinical research
• How to summarize and graph data
• The scoop on accuracy, precision, standard errors, and confidence intervals
• Ways to compare groups
• Common distribution functions
• Simple rules for sample-size calculations

About the Author

John C. Pezzullo, PhD, has held faculty appointments in the departments of biomathematics and biostatistics, pharmacology, nursing, and internal medicine at Georgetown University. He is semi-retired and continues to teach biostatistics and clinical trial design online to Georgetown University students.

Direct download links available for PRETITLE Biostatistics For Dummies ) POSTTITLE

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Series: For Dummies (Health & Fitness)
• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (July 29, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1118553985
• ISBN-13: 978-1118553985
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Biostatistics For Dummies ) PDF

Score your highest in biostatistics

Biostatistics is a required course for students of medicine, epidemiology, forestry, agriculture, bioinformatics, and public health. In years past this course has been mainly a graduate-level requirement; however its application is growing and course offerings at the undergraduate level are exploding. Biostatistics For Dummies is an excellent resource for those taking a course, as well as for those in need of a handy reference to this complex material.

Biostatisticians—analysts of biological data—are charged with finding answers to some of the world's most pressing health questions: how safe or effective are drugs hitting the market today? What causes autism? What are the risk factors for cardiovascular disease? Are those risk factors different for men and women or different ethnic groups? Biostatistics For Dummies examines these and other questions associated with the study of biostatistics.

• Provides plain-English explanations of techniques and clinical examples to help
• Serves as an excellent course supplement for those struggling with the complexities of the biostatistics
• Tracks to a typical, introductory biostatistics course

Biostatistics For Dummies is an excellent resource for anyone looking to succeed in this difficult course.

I have been teaching biostatistics for more than a dozen years and I am always looking for a book that is readable, thoughtful and not too technical for a math phobic audience. This book does very well on all three criteria and will now be on my short list with Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials, 3e and Intuitive Biostatistics: A Nonmathematical Guide to Statistical Thinking. The prose is clear and the for dummies margin icons for important/dangerous/etc topics really helps to make this an easy and fast read. The book is not too shallow in the topics that are covered. I was not pleased when I saw Bayesian statistics were missing from the index but those ideas are mentioned as web bonus material. There is a bit of mathematical notation early on but readers who truly hate it will be able to read around it without loosing the gist.

The one real shortcoming of the book is the lack of a cohesive introduction to any statistical package. All the major packages (SAS, R, SPSS, etc) are introduced and many of the less expensive options (including web resources) are mentioned. The coverage of the packages are balanced (but the comments on SAS are not entirely true). The book would be much stronger with a web compendium that explains how to do all the common analyses in the common packages.

The book does an excellent job of encouraging people to think about data, as opposed to just doing math.

BIOSTATISTICS FOR DUMMIES is a 390 page book on biostatistics where the emphasis is on clinical trials. From my own experience as a medical writer, I know that Clinical Study Protocols, Clinical Study Reports, Investigator's Brochures, and so on, make frequent use of statistical concepts and formulas such as, alpha value, type I error, type II error, Kaplan-Meier plots, Z statistic, t statistic, P value, confidence interval, standard deviation, and others. Most of these formulas are described in this book. This book takes care to explain concepts that might be overlooked in other statistics textbooks, such as the fact that the determination of a P value, "is arbitrary, it depends on how much of a risk you're willing to take of being fooled by random fluctuations, that is, of making a Type I error. Over the years, the value of 0.05 has become accepted as a reasonable criterion for declaring significance" (page 43). This type of description provides a good background for the medical writer. For example, this morning I was reading a Clinical Study Protocol, which had been submitted with a SPA, where the P value for interim analysis was 0.002 and where the P value for analysis when the clinical trial was completed was 0.04. The book fails to provide guidance on how to solve any formulas in biostatistics. The book fails to include any problem sets, and it certainly does not include any answers. This book will not enable any novice to understand any statistical formulas. On the other hand, if you already understand biostatistics and know how to work the formulas by hand, then this book will be useful for tying all of the formulas together, and for providing a "big picture" of biostatistics. The book takes the same tactic as that taken by actor Robert Preston in THE MUSIC MAN.