Gregg-Graniteville Library: Public Health: BioStats

Introduction

Biostatistics is the science of collecting, organizing, and analyzing data. It is concerned with how we ought to make decisions when analyzing biomedical data.It is the evolving discipline concerned with formulating explicit rules to compensate both for the fallibility of human intuition in general and for biases in study design in particular.

Biostatistics is divided into two branches:

DESCRIPTIVE:

Simply describe the data pertaining to a population or a sample, specifically the center of the data (mean, median, and mode), the spread (variability of the data points), and the shape of the plotted graph (such as symmetrical or not).

Cannot be used to test hypotheses.

INFERENTIAL

When we make conclusions about two or more populations, that is inference.
Drawing conclusions about a population from a sample.
A study population is a small sample of the entire population with a condition.
You want to estimate some effect/difference from the sample to the larger population.
But when making this kind of inference, there is always uncertainty.
We deal with this uncertainty with p-values and confidence intervals.