Chapter 1

Biostatistics 101

In This Chapter

arrow Getting up to speed on the prerequisites for biostatistics

arrow Understanding the clinical research environment

arrow Surveying the special procedures used to analyze biological data

arrow Estimating how many subjects you need

arrow Working with distributions

Biostatistics deals with the design and execution of scientific experiments on living creatures, the acquisition and analysis of data from those experiments, and the interpretation and presentation of the results of those analyses.

This book is meant to be a useful and easy-to-understand companion to the more formal textbooks used in graduate-level biostatistics courses. Because most of these courses concentrate on the more clinical areas of biostatistics, this book focuses on that area as well. In this chapter, I introduce you to the fundamentals of biostatistics.

Brushing Up on Math and Stats Basics

Chapters 2 and 3 are designed to bring you up to speed on the basic math and statistical background that’s ...

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