Syllabus for Biostats Course VHM 801 at AVC - Fall semester 2024

The syllabus for the final exam of VHM 801 broadly consists of the material covered in Sessions 1-12 of the course. For each of the textbooks allowed (see note on textbook), this corresponds roughly to the following material.

Baldi & Moore (4th): Chapters 1-7, 9-15, 17-20, 22-24,

• exclude Sections (numbering following the Contents, e.g. 1.0-1.8 for Chapter 1) 1.8, 6.5, 7.5, 7.6, 9.6, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 12.5, 12.6, 18.5, 20.6, 20.7.

• exclude Sections 1.3, 2.5, 4.5, 11.1
• include (from another book or lecture handouts) material on sampling and experimental design,
• include (from another book or lecture handouts) more detailed material on one and two proportions,
• include (from another book or lecture handouts) confidence and prediction intervals for linear regression,
• include (from another book or lecture handouts) more detailed material on two-way tables and one-way ANOVA.

• exclude Sections 3.4, 6.4, 7.3, 9.3
• exclude all "Beyond the basics" sections, except pp. 477-79 and 494-96 ("plus four" method for one and two proportions),
• exclude specific formulae for power calculations for t-tests (Section 7.1) and the F-test of one-way ANOVA (Section 12.2).

• Supplementary Chapter 26 of Baldi & Moore, excluding Section 26.3 (contrasts),
• Supplementary Chapter 27 of Baldi & Moore; note however that calculations of P-values for rank-based tests is not included,
• Supplementary Notes on sample size calculations, Section 1 (1.1-1.7),
• the Bonferroni method for pairwise comparisons in ANOVA (not in Baldi & Moore and Stevens textbooks),
• model checking by residuals for regression and ANOVA (not in Stevens textbook),
• the t-test for correlations (not in Baldi & Moore and Stevens textbooks).

• Bayes formula, tree diagrams,
• calculation of probabilities in a binomial distribution by the normal approximation,
• McNemar's test and kappa calculation,
• manual calculation of P-values for non-parametric tests based on ranks,
• the Poisson distribution,
• Fisher's exact test,
• contrasts for ANOVA,
• manual calculations of estimates, standard errors or prediction errors in regression models,
• Spearman's rank correlation (rho),
• multiple regression,
• equivalence tests.