It has been pretty well established that I am the worst soccer mom in the history of soccer moms. Most of the games I miss because I am somewhere else. My children have told me that my autobiography should be entitled, “I was out of town at the time” because most of the stories of…
Getting ready to teach biostatistics in a few weeks and it seems to me that the real confusion in most cases is not the calculations, which can be fairly simple, but rather that there can be several ways of looking at the same question. Let’s take “risk” as an example. What is the “risk” of…
Any time I hear someone brag, “I’ve never used X in my life,” I automatically assume that whatever it is, they haven’t learned it very well. Just about everything I’ve learned has come in useful, and the better I learned it, the more useful it is. Take statistics, for example. There is nowhere in my…
There is not nearly enough replication in scientific research. It’s unfortunate that funding agencies and academic journals always want to see a new twist – a different technique, a different population. Personally, I’m very interested in reading studies that say: “I did the exact same study as Mary Lou Who and I found pretty much…
I’m giving a talk on Preparing Students for the Real World of Data at SAS Global Forum next month. You’d think 50 minutes would be long enough for me to talk, but that just goes to show you don’t know me as well as you think you do. One point made in the template for…
In case you don’t know, SAS On-Demand is the FREE , as in free beer, offering of SAS for academic use. How good is it? There really can’t be one answer to that. First of all, there are multiple options – SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Enterprise Guide, JMP, etc. so some may be…
Physicians say that once a patient hears the word “cancer”, their brain shuts down and they don’t hear anything else. To be fair to the patients, understanding survival statistics isn’t always simple. Let’s take just one example: The three-year survival rate is different from the third-year survival rate. If you have been told that the…
Kappa is a useful measure of agreement between two raters. Say you have two radiologists looking at X-rays, rating them as normal or abnormal and you want to get a quantitative measure of how well they agree. Kappa is your go-to coefficient. How do you compute it? Well, personally, I use SAS because this is…
Listen my dears and you will learn the difference between incidence and prevalence and why effective treatment for a disease may mean that more people have it. Prevalence is the number of people in the population who have a disease. It is computed as Number of people with disease X 1,000 Number in population…
You’d think the ultimate example of simplicity in measurement would be mortality rate. Count up the dead people – they aren’t hard to catch. Divide by the total number of people you had when you started. Done. It’s not super complicated but it is slightly more complicated than that. First of all, how do you…