Abstract
This chapter starts with a brief essay that reminds us of the nature of statistical modeling and its inherent limitations. Statistical modeling encompasses a wide range of techniques with different levels of complexity. We limit this chapter mostly to an introductory-level treatment of some techniques that have gained prominence in epidemiology. For more in-depth coverage and for other topics we refer to other didactical sources. Every health researcher is likely, at some point in her career, to make use of statistical smoothing techniques, logistic regression, modeling of probability functions, or time-to event analysis. These topics are introduced in this chapter (using Panel 24.1 terminology), and so is the increasingly important topic of cost-effectiveness analysis.
All models are wrong, some models are useful.
G.E.P. Box
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Borghi E et al (2006) Construction of the World Health Organization child growth standards: selection methods for attained growth curves. Stat Med 25:247–265
Breslow NE (1975) Analysis of survival data under the proportional hazards model. Int Stat Rev 43:45–57
Briggs A (2001) Handling uncertainty in economic evaluation and presenting the results. In: Drummond M, McGuire A (eds) Economic evaluation in health care. Merging theory with practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 172–214. ISBN 0192631764
Briggs AM, Sculpher M, Claxton K (2006) Decision modeling for health economic evaluation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 1–237. ISBN 9780198526629
Cole TJ, Green PJ (1992) Smoothing reference centile curves: the LMS method and penalized likelihood. Stat Med 11:1305–1319
Drummond MF et al (2005) Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 1–396. ISBN 0198529457
Fadnes LT et al (2011) Vaccination coverage and timeliness in three South African areas: a prospective study. BMC Public Health 11:404
Francis D et al (2009) Fast-food and sweetened beverage consumption: association with overweight and high waist circumference in Jamaican adolescents. Public Health Nutr 12:1106–1114
Growth Analyser, version 3.0 (Application) (2009) Dutch Growth Foundation, Rotterdam. www.growthanalyser.org. Accessed Feb 2013
Hanley J, Miettinen OS (2009) Fitting smooth-in-time prognostic risk functions via logistic regression. Int J Biostat 5:1–23
Karlsson G, Johannesson M (1996) The decision rules of cost-effectiveness analysis. Pharmacoeconomics 9:113–120
Kleinbaum DG, Klein M (2002) Logistic regression: a self-learning text, 2nd edn. Springer, New York, pp 1–520. ISBN 0387953973
Lee ET, Go OT (1997) Survival analysis in public health research. Annu Rev Public Health 18:105–134
Leung KM, Elashoff RM, Afifi AA (1997) Censoring issues in survival analysis. Annu Rev Public Health 18:83–104
McGuire A (2001) Theoretical concepts in the economic evaluation of health care. In: Drummond M, McGuire A (eds) Economic evaluation in health care: merging theory with practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 1–21. ISBN 0192631764
Miettinen OS (1985) Theoretical epidemiology. Delmar, New York, pp 1–359. ISBN 0827343132
Miettinen OS (2011a) Epidemiological research: terms and concepts. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 1–175. ISBN 9789400711709
Miettinen OS (2011b) Up from clinical epidemiology & EBM. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 1–175. ISBN 9789048195008
Miettinen OS et al (2008) Clinical diagnosis of pneumonia, typical of experts. J Eval Clin Pract 14:343–350
Robberstad B, Evjen-Olsen B (2010) Preventing mother to child transmission of HIV with highly active antiretroviral treatment in Tanzania–a prospective cost-effectiveness study. JAIDS 55:397–403
Robberstad B et al (2011) Economic evaluation of second generation pneumococcal conjugate vaccines in Norway. Vaccine 29:8564–8574
Steyerberg E (2009) Clinical prediction models. A practical approach to development, validation, and updating. Springer, New York, pp 1–497. ISBN 9780387772431
Thinkhamrop B (2001) A handbook of categorical data analysis in health science research. Khon Kaen University Press, Khon Kaen, pp 1–274. ISBN 9746540947
Tugwell P, Knottnerus A, Idzerda L (2012) Is an odds ratio of 3 too high a threshold for true associations in clinical epidemiology? J Clin Epidemiol 65:465–466
Weinstein MC (1995) From cost-effectiveness ratios to resource allocation: where to draw the line? In: Sloan FA (ed) Valuing health care. Costs, benefits, and effectiveness of pharmaceuticals and other medical technologies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 77–97. ISBN 0521576466
Zhang J, Yu KF (1998) What’s the relative risk? A method of correcting the odds ratio in cohort studies of common outcomes. JAMA 280:1690–1691
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Van den Broeck, J., Fadnes, L.T., Robberstad, B., Thinkhamrop, B. (2013). Statistical Modeling. In: Van den Broeck, J., Brestoff, J. (eds) Epidemiology: Principles and Practical Guidelines. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5989-3_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5989-3_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5988-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5989-3
eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)