Introduction to Biostatistics and Epidemiology

The purpose of the course Introduction to Biostatistics and Epidemiology is to develop student's critical ability to analyze biomedical data through the interaction with biomedical researchers. The course consists of two main sections aiming at introducing students to a general understanding of the analysis of medical data. In the epidemiology section students will learn the principles of planning observational studies and the study of the relationship between exposure and health in the population. In the biostatistics section, the focus will be the application of statistical methods to biology and medicine, through the evaluation of diagnostic procedures and the application of statistical inference and regression models to the planning and analysis of clinical studies.

The acquisition of the abilities related to Biostatistics for a data scientist, contributes to the formation of a methodological habitus suitable to integrate, in daily practice, the clinical knowledge coming from biomedical researchers with the evidence framework provided by the inferential reasoning.
The student is expected to understand the principles of study design, measures of disease frequency and measures of risk, the concept of causality, bias, confounding, effect modification and latency period, the evaluation of diagnostic tests, precision and accuracy, reference limits.
The student is also expected to understand and use inferential statistics through hypothesis testing, p-values and confidence intervals, the difference between statistical significance and clinical importance, correlation and regression, the difference between parametric and non-parametric tests, categorical tests (Chi-square and Fisher), sample size calculations and statistical power, adjustment for multiple tests, censored data and the use of regression models in biosciences.