Tag: epidemiology

StackExchange and CrossValidated: An Epidemiologist’s Review

This seems like as good a day as any to review CrossValidated, and the whole StackExchange constellation of websites. It’s been a month since I joined, exactly, and today I also crossed the 1,000 reputation threshold on the site. So why not give my impressions of it? First, how I got there in the first […]

Sampling from a Bayesian Posterior Distribution in SAS

One of the things that frequently comes up in my research is the need to estimate a parameter from data, and then randomly draw samples from that parameter’s distribution to plug into another model. If you have a regular estimate from something like PROC LOGISTIC or PROC GENMOD, this is easy as pie, as SAS […]

Coding, GUIs and Statistical Rituals

I was recently inspired to comment on this blog post, asking is R is a cure for ‘mindless statistics’. Anyone whose familiar with statistics used in applied fields like epidemiology, sociology, social sciences generally will be familiar with the idea of a ‘statistical ritual’. Rather than think about the proper statistical approach to every question, […]

Example 8.29: Risk ratios and odds ratios

When can you safely think of an odds ratio as being similar to a risk ratio?Many people find odds ratios hard to interpret, and thus would prefer to have risk ratios. In response to this, you can find several papers that purport to convert an odds rat…

Randomly Generating a Truncated Normal Distribution

A brief foray into the actual nitty-gritty aspects of research, especially the part that seems to dominate the time of a graduate student in Epidemiology: coding. Particularly, the code for generating random numbers from a truncated normal distribution in SAS 9.2. Generating numbers from a regular normal distribution is easy as pie: x=rannor(seed), where x […]