Foundations of Biostatistics

This book offers a comprehensive guide to essential techniques and methods in biostatistics, addressing the underlying concepts to aid in comprehension. The use of biostatistics techniques has increased manifold in the recent past, due to their suitability for applications in a wide range of problems in various fields. This book helps learners grasp the materials in detail, equipping them to use biostatistics techniques independently and confidently. The book starts with a summary of background materials, followed by methods and techniques. As such, with only minimum guidance from teachers, this book can provide materials for self-learning of biostatistics techniques with a deeper level of understanding. The first two chapters focus on fundamental concepts, sources of data, data types, organization of data, and descriptive statistics, followed by the basic probability concepts, distributions and sampling distributions needed in order to combine descriptive statistics with inferential techniques. Estimation and tests of hypotheses are illustrated in two separate chapters. Important measures of association, linear regression, analysis of variance and logistic regression, and proportional hazards models are then presented systematically, ensuring that the book covers the topics most essential to students and users of biostatistics in connection with a wide range of applications in various fields. The book has been carefully structured, and the content is presented in a sequence covering the essential background in a highly systematic manner, supporting the learning process by presenting theory and applications that complement one another.

M. Ataharul Islam is currently QMH Professor at ISRT, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is a former professor of statistics at the University Sains Malaysia, King Saud University, University of Dhaka and East West University, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Hawaii and University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of Pauline Stitt Award, WNAR Biometric Society Award for content and writing, University Grants Commission Award for book and research, and the Ibrahim Gold Medal for research. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals, on various topics, particularly longitudinal and repeated measures data, including multistate and multistage hazards models, statistical models for repeated measures data, Markov models with covariate dependence, generalized linear models, and conditional and joint models for correlated outcomes.

Abdullah Al-Shiha is currently a professor of statistics at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He has published in international journals on various topics, particularly experimental design. He is the author of a book, and co-author of two books. In addition to his academic career, he has worked as a consultant and as a statistician with several governmental and private institutions. He has also received several research grants.