James Cook University Subject Handbook - 2003

TM5522:03

Advanced Biostatistics for Public Health *

Block mode Semester 2.

Staff: Assoc. Professor R Müller, Dr P Buttner (Coordinators).

Students will need to have successfully completed Biostatistics for Public Health ( TM5516 or equivalent) with a Distinction or better. Before enrolling please contact Assoc. Professor Reinhold Müller at Reinhold.Muller@jcu.edu.au.

This subject introduces students to the practical side of advanced biostatistics. Basic principles of biostatistics will be revised briefly and then extended to multivariate techniques including Cox survival analysis, multiple regression, logistic regression and different ANOVA approaches. Principles of data analysis will be presented and exercised with the statistical software package SPSS in practicals. Actual databases deliver the means of exercising. Half the subject is lectures, the other half is ‘hands on’ exercises with SPSS on computers.

Theory: The subject will briefly review the content of introductory Biostatistics for Public Health and will expand into the theory of multivariate analysis. In detail, multiple regression, logistic regression, Cox proportional hazard analysis and analysis of variance will be introduced. CART analysis, a mean of explorative data analysis will be discussed. Emphasis will be on the building of meaningful models and the interpretation of results of these multivariate analyses.

Practical: It will explore a broad range of data analysis issues such as questionnaire design, data input, data cleaning, descriptive analysis, graphical display, bivariate statistics, correlation matrix, coding and multivariate techniques. CART analysis and all of the above mentioned multivariate methods will be applied and exercised with real data sets.

Learning Objectives:

1. to gain experience in computer based data handling, data cleaning, transforming and bivariate testing;
2. to gain a practical understanding of some important multivariate techniques;
3. to acquire the basic knowledge necessary to run these models in statistical packages and to interpret the findings;
4. to gain insight and skills required when contributing to the biostatisticsl side in research groups.

Assessment by means of 10 invigilated assignments (10% each).