Logistic Regression: A Self-Learning Text PDF

Rating: (13 reviews) Author: David G. Kleinbaum ISBN : 9781441917416 New from $71.97 Format: PDF

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This very popular textbook is now in its third edition. Whether students or working professionals, readers appreciate its unique "lecture book" format. They often say the book reads like they are listening to an outstanding lecturer. This edition includes three new chapters, an updated computer appendix, and an expanded section about modeling guidelines that consider causal diagrams. Like previous editions, this textbook provides a highly readable description of fundamental and more advanced concepts and methods of logistic regression. It is suitable for researchers and statisticians in medical and other life sciences as well as academicians teaching second-level regression methods courses. The new chapters are: Additional Modeling Strategy Issues, including strategy with several exposures, screening variables, collinearity, influential observations and multiple-testing, assessing Goodness to Fit for Logistic Regression, assessing Discriminatory Performance of a Binary Logistic Model: ROC Curves. The Computer Appendix provides step-by-step instructions for using STATA (version 10.0), SAS (version 9.2), and SPSS (version 16) for procedures described in the main text.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Series: Statistics for Biology and Health
• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 3rd ed. 2010 edition (July 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1441917411
• ISBN-13: 978-1441917416
• Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 6.9 x 9.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Logistic Regression: A Self-Learning Text PDF

This book has a specific goal. It's aim is to give a basic competence in the use of logistic regression, related techniques, and the software that deal with them. This, it does very well. By intent, it leaves many other needs unmet.

The format is 13 chapters, possibly representing the 13 or 14 weeks in a typical school term. Each chapter has a specific statement of teaching goals at the front, a summary outline of the course to date in the back, and a few pages of questions or exercises with answers. There appear to be sample data sets available, formatted for popular stats packages, but I did not figure out how they are made available. Within the main text of each chapter, every page reads like a blackboard lecture: equations on the left and narration on the right. The presentation uses a minimum of math, just a little algebra and exponentials in a few specific forms.

For the aspiring tool-user, this book may be worth a semester's tuition. I can fault it only for an annoying habit of writing out in words equations that appear on the same page ("e raised to the power of the sum of products ... ").

This book is NOT meant for people truly interested in the theory or practice of the exact computations. For example, its use of probability scarely mentions joint or conditional distributions. As a result, some of its formulas (e.g. p.48) come across as rote memorization, instead of natural expressions of the laws of probability. Lacking joint probability, the covariance matrix can not have meaning. It is just something produced, somehow, by an oracular computer program.

The repeated phrase, "according to statisticians ..." makes it very clear that statisticians are a breed distinct from intended audience.

If you want to learn about logistic regression (LR), and are an applied statistics user (especially in medical, health, or policy areas), this is the book for you. It is thorough in coverage and focuses deeply on the fundamentals: understanding applications of LR, interpreting the results, developing intuition for the procedures, and avoiding common errors.

You might wonder: what is LR good for? The answer: when you want to assess a dichotomous outcome on the basis of any kind of predictors. For example, to predict disease occurrence (0/1) on the basis of gender, behaviors, income, etc. Or to predict a behavior (0/1) on the basis of psychological scores, demographics, etc.

The book follows a "lecture plus commentary" style, where a primary didactic text is heavily annotated with sidebar comments, summaries, reviews of the material, and quizzes with answers. Overall this is a good thing and makes the book extremely well-suited for self study. However, it also makes it extremely long and moderately tedious to read at times. Unlike many stats books, however, it actually is readable.

The mathematics are held to a high school level (i.e., algebra), so it is suitable for any applied researcher or research consumer, although therefore probably not suitable for a professional statistician. Still, it is mathematically rigorous and requires to reader to work through a large number of (simple) formulas, contingency tables, and the like.

One odd omission is R: the book covers procedures for SAS, SPSS, and Stata, but not R. The authors' website appears not to be updated since the 2nd edition, and also does not cover R. That is a puzzling lacuna given the growing popularity of R in general and especially in bioinformatics.