Foundations of biostatistics

In this unit you will be introduced to the basic principles and methods used in biostatistics as applied to public health and clinical research. The key concepts covered will include the technical qualifications necessary for analysing and interpreting data on a descriptive and bivariate level. In this unit you will cover topics which include classification of health data, sampling methods;, study design, summarizing data using simple statistical methods and graphical presentation, sampling distributions, quantifying uncertainty in results from a sample, statistical distributions (normal and t-distribution), comparing two independent/paired groups using t-test (p-value) and confidence intervals, comparing more than two groups using Analysis of variance (ANOVA), non-parametric tests for comparing two or more groups when normality assumptions do not hold, assessing the association between an outcome and an exposure using the chi-squared test, and risk comparisons (RR & OR).