Statistics in Health-Related Fields

Synonyms

Biostatistics

Definition

Biostatistics is the application of statistics in health-related fields, including public health, medicine and biology, and the development of new tools to study these areas. Biostatistics constitutes the quantitative foundation for public health practice and research. It comprises the reasoning and methods for using data as evidence to address public health and biomedical questions. The domain of biostatistics includes: statistical aspects of public health and biomedical research design (how and why the data have been collected), descriptive statistics (description or summarization of a collection of data) and inferential statistics (the drawing of inferences about a pool of data when only a part of the data are observed). The latter can also be seen as the modeling of patterns in the data, in a way that accounts for randomness and uncertainty in the observations, to draw inferences...