Foundations of Biostatistics

Term 2, 2024

This website provides information about PHCM9795: Foundations of Biostatistics.

Welcome

Welcome to PHCM9795 Foundations of Biostatistics.

This is an introductory course in biostatistics which will teach you core skills to analyse and present quantitative data from different study types. These fundamental skills will help you in your studies and throughout your career.

Course information

How can we use data to tell a story?

• How can we show whether COVID-19 cases are increasing over time?
• How can we estimate the smoking rate in Australia?
• How can we assess whether a new treatment reduces pain in patients with arthritis?

Welcome to Foundations of Biostatistics. In this course, we will introduce you to fundamental data visualisation skills to create meaningful and appealing graphical summaries of your data. We will explore which numeric summaries are best to describe your data, discuss why there is variability in these summaries and how to represent this variability. We will show how to test hypotheses to answer real-world research questions. Finally, we will explore how many participants should be enrolled to provide robust conclusions when designing a study.

The core course can be studied in an online or in-person mode (or a mixture of both), and teaches you to how to obtain and interpret biostatistical output using software, while minimising mathematical formulae. We will demonstrate output using two of the most commonly used biostatistics and data science software packages today: Stata and R, and you can choose which package you would like to learn.

We invite you to learn how to tell a story using data.