Course content

• Epidemiologic approach to clinical trials: observational studies, cross-sectional studies, designing a case control study, bias in a case-control study, matching issues, cohort studies, design of a cohort study, biases in a cohort study, comparing case and cohort studies, randomized trials, selection of subjects, crossover trials, issues on sample size, recruitment. Case studies to explore above topics.
• Spatial Epidemiology: Geographical Representation and Mapping, Spatial Interpolation and Smoothing Methods, Estimation and Inference, Spatial Proximity Indices, Disease Clustering, Spatial Regression, Infectious disease modelling.
• Survival Analysis in Epidemiology: Functions of survival time, censoring mechanisms, nonparametric estimators of survival function, Cox’s proportional hazards model, Cases studies using survival analysis methods in health research.

References

• Lawson, A. Statistical Methods in Spatial Epidemiology, 2nd Edition, Wiley, New York, 2006.
• Gordis, L. Epidemiology, 5th Edition, Elsevier Saunders, Philadelphia, 2014.
• Kalbfleisch, J. and Prentice, R. The Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data, 2nd Edition, Wiley, New York, 2002.
• Lee, E. and Wang, J. Statistical methods for survival data analysis, 3rd Edition, John Wiley & Sons., Hoboken, 2003.