Scott S. Emerson, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Biostatistics
Department of Biostatistics
University of Washington

Online: Introductory Applied Biostatistics
This course provides an introduction to the statistical analysis of data.

The major objectives of this course are to explore the ways in which statistical methods can be used to address scientific questions, to present simple data analysis methods, and to teach a general approach to a data analysis problem. To those ends, this course will stress the general abstraction of descriptive and inferential statistics to address a scientific question. We primarily address methods for the setting of one response variable and one grouping variable. This includes one and two sample problems, one way analysis of variance, and simple regression. Late in the course we address stratified analyses.

Topics covered will include definition of common descriptive techniques, estimation and testing for continuous, discrete, and censored response variables in parametric models, and semiparametric and nonparametric alternatives to those tests, including Monte Carlo methods. Emphasis will be placed on the similarity among the various forms of analyses.

The materials for this course are primarily re-packaging of the handouts and lectures from Biost 514 / 517 at the University of Washington, especially as taught in fall 2012.

Possible reference texts (I use no text, because none seems sufficiently distribution-free in focus)