Statistics for Biologists: Related Topics

The pages (listed left)These pages  deal with a series of statistical, medical, veterinary and ecological topics that are intimately connected with biostatistical issues, but do not fit neatly into the main topics summarised via the other 3 buttons on top of this page. These 'related topics' are somewhat an odd mix of topics, but we hope you will just 'graze around'.

Since these pages were extracted from our book, which began as a course on statistics for biologists, they comprise a mixture of elementary and advanced topics. However, since the most elementary statistical mistakes are also the most common ones, and because everyone has some 'blind spots', we make no apology for that. - Medical and ecological researchers have very different ideas as to what are 'basic' statistical practices.

• For medics and vets we consider issues such as the concept of a gold standard test, how you estimate the true prevalence of a disease, analysis by 'intention to treat', Berkson's bias, systematic allocation, unequal randomization, allocation concealment and blinding.

• For ecologists we have pages on the logarithmic series distribution, and Taylor's Power Law for describing the distribution of organisms. We also cover some more strictly statistical issues such as Chauvenet's criterion for identifying outliers, Gaussian smoothing and the efficiency of tests, the Box-Cox transformation, log normal confidence intervals and confidence intervals by permutation.

If you care to examine our book you should be able to see how it all fits together!.

	For full details see: Dransfield R.D., Brightwell R. (2012)   How to Get On Top of Statistics: Design & Analysis for Biologists, with R. InfluentialPoints, UK. [full text]