Chapter 1

Biostatistics 101

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting up to speed on the prerequisites for biostatistics

Understanding the human research environment

Surveying the specific procedures used to analyze biological data

Estimating how many participants you need

Working with distributions

Biostatistics deals with the design and execution of scientific studies involving biology, the acquisition

and analysis of data from those studies, and the interpretation and presentation of the results of those

analyses. This book is meant to be a useful and easy-to-understand companion to the more formal

textbooks used in graduate-level biostatistics courses. Because most of these courses teach how to

analyze data from epidemiologic studies and clinical trials, this book focuses on that as well. In this

first chapter, we introduce you to the fundamentals of biostatistics.

Brushing Up on Math and Stats Basics

Chapters 2 and 3 are designed to bring you up to speed on the basic math and statistical background

that’s needed to understand biostatistics and give you supplementary information or context that you

may find useful while reading the rest of this book.

Many people feel unsure of themselves when it comes to understanding mathematical formulas and

equations. Although this book contains fewer formulas than many statistics books, we include them

when they help illustrate a concept or describe a calculation that’s simple enough to do by hand.

But if you’re a real mathophobe, you probably dread looking at any chapter that has a math

expression anywhere in it. That’s why we include Chapter 2, “Overcoming Mathophobia” to show

you how to read and understand the basic mathematical notation we use in this book. We cover

everything from basic mathematical operations to functions and beyond.

If you’re in a graduate-level biostatistics course, you’ve probably already taken one or two

introductory statistics courses. But that may have been a while ago, and you may feel unsure of

your knowledge of the basic statistical concepts. Or you may have little or no formal statistical

training but now find yourself in a work situation where you interact with clinical researchers,

participate in the design of research projects, or work with the results from biological research. If

so, read Chapter 3, which provides an overview of the fundamental concepts and terminology of

statistics. There, you get the scoop on topics such as probability, randomness, populations,

samples, statistical inference, accuracy, precision, hypothesis testing, nonparametric statistics, and

simulation techniques.