Название: Statistics at Square One, 12th Edition
Автор: Michael J. Campbell
Издательство: Wiley-Blackwell
Год: 2021
Страниц: 303
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 10.2 MB

The new edition of the popular introduction to the world of statistics for health care professionals and medical students.

First published nearly three decades ago, Statistics at Square One remains one of the most popular introductions to medical statistics. Now in its twelfth edition, this international bestseller continues to be a must-have resource for anyone in need of a thorough introduction to statistics in the health sciences. Clear and accessible chapters help students with no previous background in the subject understand fundamental topics including summary statistics for quantitative and binary data, diagnostic and screening tests, populations and samples, survival analysis, correlation and regression, study design, computer modeling, and more.

This edition reflects contemporary understanding of medical statistics and emphasizes the importance of statistics in public health, including extensively updated coverage of diagnostic tests and new examples. All figures and examples now include code to reproduce them in the R statistical software. New chapters cover the basics for understanding numbers and introduce the use of models in medical statistical analysis. Based on the author’s many years of experience teaching medical and health science students, the latest edition of this classic textbook:

Highlights the connections between different medical statistics methods
Emphasizes the proper use of p-values in testing
Features practical examples from recent literature
Contains end-of-chapter exercises with answers, some of which are based on the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Advanced Knowledge Test

There have been other important changes in the statistical arena since the 11th edition. Free statistical software has become more generally available and is easier to use, particularly R with RStudio and R commander, so I have rewritten all the examples and figures in that package. All the code is given, making replication easy. The package OpenEpi remains useful and very easy to use, so I have retained some examples applying it. Computer‐intensive methods such as the bootstrap are readily understood and now easily implemented, so they are included. The links between methods are described, and this is made easier with computer‐intensive methods, which do not require specific assumptions for different methods. The formulas and worked examples are retained because without them the computer software is just a ‘black box’. The exercises on ‘playing with the data’ are also retained, since the advantage of using computers is that it is little additional effort to change the data and see the effect on the results. This kind of exercise emphasises which assumptions are important and which are less so.

This 12th edition comes with two new chapters. The first is on understanding basic numbers. This may seem somewhat elementary, but it has been my experience that many newspapers and politicians misuse basic data, to such an extent that the misuse is often accepted without comment, so I hope this chapter will provide a handy guide to scepticism on official pronouncements. I have also added a new chapter on modelling.

Computers are now ubiquitous and so should be used for more complex calculations. For serious analysis, a commercial package should be used. Stata is the package of choice for the more complex statistics used in Statistics at Square Two. A proper commercial package will include a spreadsheet database that can handle missing values as well as category labels. Certain spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel can also do some statistical analysis. However, I would not recommend spreadsheets for general statistical analysis. The best and most comprehensive free statistical package is the R package and since it is free it is universally available and can be used throughout the world. A useful, user‐friendly package that uses R programs is R Commander and there are useful books on the subject. For simple tables I would recommend the free programme OpenEpi, which is no longer being maintained but is still useful.

Statistics at Square One is required reading for all medical and health care practitioners and students wanting to understand the use and value of statistical analysis in the health sciences.

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