Biostatistics in Research
Curriculum
Module 1: Introduction to Biostatistics in Research
• Role of statistics in medicine/health
• Variation in measurements
• Sources of variation
• Types of variables/data
• Scales of measurement
• Sources of data
Module 2: Data Manipulation, Summariz ation and Presentation
• How to summarize medical data
• Concept of raw data sets and their treatment
• Frequency Distribution Tables (one-way, two-way)
• Diagrams (Histogram, Bar Charts)
• Measures of central tendency (Arithmetic mean, median, mode)
• Measures of dispersion (variance, SD, CV, quantiles, etc)
Module 3: Introduction to Inferential Statistics
• The Normal Distribution
• population – vs – sample, sampling distributions.
• Parameters and statistics, standard error of a mean,
• Confidence intervals
• Hypothesis testing
• definition of null and Alternative hypothesis
• Errors in decisions making (Type 1 and 2 errors)
• Level of significance (P-value)
• Choice of appropriate test statistic based on the type of data and study design
Module 4: Inferential Statistics 1 ( Parametric and Non Parametric tests )
• Parametric and Non-parametric tests (Definitions & Examples)
• Inference on comparisons of means
• Student t-test (One sample, Independent and paired samples)
Module 5: Inferential Statistics 2
• Statistical inference on Proportions
• Comparisons of two proportions
• Chi-square test
• Comparisons of proportions in paired samples
• Multiple Group comparisons –one-way analysis of variance.
Module 6: Correlation and regression
• Scatter diagrams
• Correlation (Pearson and Spearman)
• Linear regression
• Estimation of regression coefficients
• Concept of multiple regression
• Introduction to statistical modelling
Module 7: Sample size determination in Research
• Need for Sample Size
• Practical considerations in sample size considerations
• Statistical considerations
• Sample size for a single estimate
• Sample size to compare two means
• Sample size to compare two proportions