STATS - STeve's Attempt to Teach Statistics (created December 22, 1997)

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. H.G. Wells

The five links that I use the most

1. Training opportunities for CMH employees
2. Statistical software for CMH employees
3. Statistical Evidence
4. Research Methodology Web Log
5. Archive organized by category

Changes and improvements (October 2008)

1. My last day at Children's Mercy Hospital is October 31, 2008. I'm not sure what will happen to this website after I'm gone. I will be adding new material to a private website, www.pmean.com. If you have any questions, please send email to mail@pmean.com.
2. The search function on this website is broken and the email link at the top of the page has been hijacked by spammers. The spam will end on October 31 along with my CMH email account. I'll add some details about how to use Google to search this site as soon as I can.
3. There were some questions raised at Children's Mercy Hospital about placing these webpages under an open access license. Until these questions are resolved it would be safest to revert to the original copyright agreement. I will modify these pages appropriately, but it will take a few days. For now, please consider any webpage in the STATS website to be copyrighted by Children's Mercy Hospital, in spite of what the footer might say. Thank you for your understanding.
4. I have written a small booklet, An introduction to diagnostic testing (PDF format), that discusses the basic statistics used to summarize a diagnostic test (sensitivity and specificity), the medical issues associated with these tests (e.g., the difficulty in testing for a rare disease, the need to balance the costs of false positives and false negatives), and applications of the likelihood ratio. I also show how to use the likelihood ratio slide rule. I'm hoping to see this incorporated into some of the Statistics training that health professionals get. If you want to use this handout in such a class, I'd like to work with you on this and get some feedback to improve the handout.

All topics

• Predicting accrual in clinical trials
• Ask Professor Mean
• Brief overview of the STATS web pages
• Details about this web site
• Definitions of important terms
• Diagnostic Testing
• Internet resources for Statistics
• How to read a medical journal article
• Likelihood ratio slide rule
• Managing your research data
• Planning your research study
• Professor Mean's library
• Research Methodology Weblog
• Selecting an appropriate sample size
• Statistical koans
• Statistical software for CMH employees
• Steps in a typical data analysis 
• Training opportunities for CMH employees

This webpage was written by Steve Simon on 1997-12-22, edited by Steve Simon, and was last modified on 2008-10-07. Send feedback to ssimon at cmh dot edu or click on the email link at the top of the page.