The BBR course currently has no live components (Zoom or YouTube live streaming) but rather relies on course notes and datamethods.org for questions, answers, and discussions. To go to the correct topic on datamethods.org for asking a question, click on the blue bubble icon at the top right of the chapter about which you are asking. See if your question has already been posted on that topic, and if not, ask it as a reply to the last posted message. The course notes also have the hypothesis annotation system activated, which can be used for questions of clarification.

Course recordings will be archived on YouTube channel BBRcourse.

The course is intended primarily for those doing research (especially biomedical research) but also for consumers of biomedical research who sometimes work with statisticians, to help those consumers understand study design and interpret results of statistical analysis. Statisticians may also enjoy the course and entering into the live discussion on YouTube.

The course content is aimed at exposing biomedical researchers to modern biostatistical methods and statistical graphics, highlighting those methods that make fewer assumptions, including nonparametric statistics and robust statistical measures. In addition to covering traditional estimation and inferential techniques, the course contrasts those with the Bayesian approach, and also includes several components that have been increasingly important in the past few years, such as challenges of high-dimensional data analysis, modeling for observational treatment comparisons, analysis of differential treatment effect (heterogeneity of treatment effect), statistical methods for biomarker research, medical diagnostic research, and methods for reproducible research.

Frank Harrell of the Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt School of Medicine have created a free comprehensive set of notes entitled Biostatistics for Biomedical Research available here. These notes comprise the primary course material. Non-statisticians are highly encouraged to simultaneously study The Analysis of Biological Data by Whitlock and Schluter, 3rd Edition. Participants who have not had any statistics training are highly encouraged to read David Spiegelhalter’s The Art of Statistics before the course starts.

The main prerequisite for the course is a good understanding of algebra. For a crash course in algebra and links to some exceptional free online resources for brushing up on your algebra skills, read Chapter 2 of the BBR notes. Those who have not studied probability and statistics before may also want to study some basic ideas such as those presented here, and watch some of the videos on probability that are linked from Section 3.9 of the course notes.

The course is sponsored by the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR) Research Methods Program in the Department of Biostatistics of the School of Medicine, and is done in coordination with Edge for Scholars. VICTR is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of NIH. More information and a place to suggest future topics may be found here. The main course notes are BBR.