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Medical Statistics: A Discipline at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics

Equating Subjective Feelings with Probabilities and Providing Quality Criteria for Diagnostic Tests

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Understanding Clinical Data Analysis

Abstract

  • Statistics is to confirm primary hypotheses.

  • Statistics improves quality research.

  • Statistics is no algebra, it requires a lot of biological thinking, and a bit of maths.

  • Statistics helps to interpret the limitations of research.

  • Statistics provides quality criteria for diagnostic tests (1) validity, (2) reproducibility, (3) precision.

But statistics has its limitations:

  • it only gives chances,

  • it produces large type I errors with multiple testing,

  • statistical significance is not always clinically relevant,

  • it has difficulties with detecting manipulated data.

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Cleophas, T.J., Zwinderman, A.H. (2017). Medical Statistics: A Discipline at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics. In: Understanding Clinical Data Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39586-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39586-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39585-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39586-9

  • eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)

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