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Statistical Methods in Epidemiology

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Introduction

Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events in specified populations and the translation of study results to control health problems at the group level. The major objectives of epidemiologic studies are to describe the extent of disease in the community, to identify risk factors (factors that influence a persons risk of acquiring a disease), to determine etiology, to evaluate both existing and new preventive and therapeutic measures (including health care delivery), and to provide the foundation for developing public policy and regulatory decisions regarding public health practice. Epidemiologic studies provide research strategies for investigating public health questions in a systematic fashion relating a given health outcome to the factors that might cause and/or prevent this outcome in human populations. Statistics informs many decisions in epidemiologic study design and statistical tools are used extensively to...

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References and Further Reading

  • Bland JM, Altman DG (2000) Statistics notes: the odds. BMJ 320:1468

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  • Breslow NE (1996) Statistics in epidemiology: the case-control study. J Am Stat Assoc 91:14–28

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron AC, Trivedi PK (1998) Regression analysis of count data. Cambridge University Press, New York

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  • Haight FA (1967) Handbook of the Poisson distribution. Wiley, New York

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  • Harrell FE (2001) Regression modeling strategies. Springer, New York

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  • Johnson NL, Kemp AW, Kotz S (2005) Univariate discrete distributions, 3rd edn. Wiley, New York

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  • Lui KJ (2004) Statistical estimation of epidemiological risk. Wiley, New York

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  • Rothman KJ, Greenland S (1998) Modern epidemiology. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia, PA

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  • Sahai H, Khurshid A (1995) Statistics in epidemiology: methods, techniques, and applications. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Filardo, G., Adams, J., Ng, H.K.T. (2011). Statistical Methods in Epidemiology. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_547

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