Preface

Never memorize something you can look up

-Albert Einstein

This book is assembled as resource for students enrolled in my biostats course at Emory University in Atlanta: IBS538 Statistical Design and Analysis.

The students are in one of Emory’s biomedical and biological sciences PhD programs. The class usually also includes the occasional Emory honors program undergrads, students from Emory’s public health school, and a few Georgia Tech graduate students.

When I finally made the switch to teaching my course in R I needed to prepare a bunch of handouts, essentially handout per statistical model. I did that using R Markdown. Then I decided to write some intro handouts. Then I found Bookdown. Before I knew it, I had a “book” that covers material the way I want to teach it. This is that. JABSTB. A collection of handouts.

Not included in this book are additional materials for the course (eg, take home and group exercises, slide decks, data sets, my extensive collection of stats cartoons, etc).

The scope of the book is to provide some background on statistical fundamentals that are most relevant to the biomedical researcher and to provide examples for running and interpreting various statistical functions. These researchers test ideas by generating data after manipulating some independent variable(s). They need to know principles of sampling, error, statistical hypotheses, types of data and experimental design.

Each chapter has a corresponding R Markdown document. If you wish to grab those documents (and any data sets read in those Markdowns) instead of using this material as HTML, go grab it on from the Github jabstb repo.

This book is a living document, subject to a lot of on-the-fly revision. Stuff will be added and eliminated over time.

As I edit these words, in 2021, my main disclaimer is that it remains an MVP. And it is clearly over-written.

If you find errors, have any suggestions, or would otherwise like to contribute, I welcome your input. Please submit a pull request and/or contact me by email.

This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences-NIH, T32 supplement 3T32GM008490-23S.

Copyright 2018-2021 © TJ Murphy MIT license.