STATISTICS 536B (2014-15, Second half of Term 2)

Statistical Theory for the Design and Analysis of Clinical Studies (1.5 Credits)

Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30-11:00, ESB 4192, starting Feb. 24th.

Instructor: Paul Gustafson, ESB 3128, gustaf at stat dot ubc dot ca.

Course Website (this page): www.stat.ubc.ca/~gustaf/stat536.html

Prererequisites: Open to any interested graduate students in the Department of Statistics. Note that 536A (taught by Lang Wu in the first-half of the term) is not a prerequisite. (But Lang and I are coordinating to avoid excess repitition across the two courses.)

Graduate students from other departments are welcome, provided they have sufficient statistical and mathematical backgrounds. Such students should consult the instructor about suitability.

To be clear, this course is primarily aimed at training statisticians or biostatisticians, so understanding the math and computing behind the methods is a key part of the course. It isn't an appropriate course for someone who just wants to use statistical methods; it's for students seeking conceptual and theoretical understanding of methods and models. Against that, though, note that the Plan B evaluation scheme described below is offered to make the course more accessible to students from other units.

Description: While the official calendar title of this course is "Statistical theory for the design and analysis of clinical studies," a more apt title might simply be "Topics in Biostatistics." The planned topics cleave nicely into three groups. So the plan is to use our 13 lecture sessions to cover:

In each of these three units we will try to survey a few key statistical ideas that seem most exciting and relevant.

Lecture Format: For a typical lecture:

Textbooks: Nothing to buy! I will try to keep things relatively simple by assigning readings only from titles that the UBC library has in its e-book collection. The following list may be ammended as we progress:

Evaluation: Plan A (mandatory for STAT students)

Evaluation: Plan B Non-STAT students may elect to replace the Assignment Questions with a (second) short report on a topic we didn't have time to explore fully in the lectures. This is in recognition that students from other units may not have the same level of math/stat/computing backgrounds.

Pre-lecture versions of slides

Evolving schedule of readings for lectures: