Welcome!

Welcome to biostatistics. PubHlth 540 is the first of a two semester sequence of introductory biostatsitics. The second course is PubHlth 640, Intermediate Biostatistics.

This course is designed for the student with no prior background in statistics. The overall goal is basic statistical literacy. This includes familiarity with concepts of chance, sampling, confidence, and statistical significance. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to do simple descriptive statistics and selected tests. Topics include: graphical and numerical description, random sampling and sampling distributions, confidence interval estimation, and the basics of statistical hypothesis testing.

This course is not a course in the use of a statistical analysis package. However, illustrations of the use of SAS, Stata, and R are provided.