Project for Biostats Course VHM 802 at AVC - Winter Semester 2025
Choice of project (data)
Maybe you have already thought about a project related to your own
research for the course project. One requirement is that the data are
"new", in the sense that they have not been analysed statistically before by
yourself or any of your colleagues. Furthermore, the project should be of
suitable size and difficulty. I'll discuss individually with each of you
whether your project is "suitable". A few rough guidelines is that the data
should contain a continuous response variable of interest, that the data
need/should not contain more than 200-300 observations, and that the
statistical methods should involve some of those from the course.
In case you don't have
project data, I think you should try to get some data which are related to your
interests, perhaps from your colleagues. Otherwise I can find a suitable data
set (but I cannot promise that you'll find it particularly interesting).
Short description of your project
You write 1-2 pages containing answers to (some of)
the following points, and give it to
me no later than March 17:
- Title (preliminary),
- Short introduction: problem and experiment/data collection,
- Data:
- how many observations/experimental units?
- which response variables measured (for each observation)?
- which explanatory variables measured?
-- this information can conveniently be presented in a table of variables with their
definition, values, hierarchical level and number of observations.
- Purpose:
- which relations would you like to study?
- which hypotheses would you like to test?
- your expectations, based on the literature and your impression of the data,
- Statistical model (draft):
- dependent and independent variables,
- type of statistical analysis (proposal),
- perhaps some points that might complicate matters.
Report
The report should overall follow the format of an article, e.g. containing the
following sections: summary, introduction, material and methods (including
statistical methods), results, discussion/conclusion, references. The reports
will be examined and marked by me.
It is important that you
describe and document the statistical analysis in detail (more than would
be needed in an article for an applied journal within your field). In
particular, you need to document your analyses by suitable software
listings or program files (e.g. a Stata do-file).
Presentation
At the "presentation day", April 10, you are going to present
your project in a small seminar (probably virtually).
Each presentation is scheduled for about 20 min (further details to be settled later).
Henrik Stryhn
(hstryhn@upei.ca) 2024-12-30