Biostatistics

Biostatistics (sometimes known as biometrics), most generally, is the application of statistics to biology and, most commonly, to medicine. Because research questions in biology and medicine are various, biostatistics has expanded its domain to include any quantitative, not just statistical, models that may be used to answer these questions. Design and analysis of clinical trials is perhaps the most publicly visible application of statistics in medicine.

Programs in biostatistics are almost exclusively post-baccalaureate (i.e., found in graduate schools). They are most often found in schools of public health, affiliated with schools of medicine, agricultural universities or as a focus of application in departments of statistics.

However, many universities that deal with ecological research have a biostatistics course that introduces concepts such as hypothesis testing for univariate and sometimes multivariate data sets with one, two, or more samples. Often this is combined or followed with some kind of experimental design course.

Statistical methods are beginning to be integrated into medical informatics and bioinformatics.

Consequently, biostatistics draws quantitative methods from fields such as:

• statistics,
• operations research,
• economics, and, generally,
• mathematics

and it is applied to research questions in fields such as:

• public health, which includes epidemiology, nutrition and environmental health,
• genomics and population genetics,
• medicine,
• ecology,
• bioassay, and
• agriculture.

Finally, the terms biostatistics and biometry appear to be interchangeable, although biometry tends to connote a biological (or even agricultural), rather than medical, application.

See also Important publications in biostatistics