Education

[suckatstats]

Hi all,

I'm currently completing my dissertation for a masters in a health field (hopefully). Once done I'm interested in additional education in statistics. It's obviously a weak point of mine. My initial biostats course was years ago so looking for something to dig into to help further in the medical field. Any suggestions on graduate certificates or other similar training? Online probably best. I'm based in Canada if it matters. Of note, I'm not looking for a masters in stats or anything - I'll leave that to the smart people. But a course/program that will help me understand the data in papers and to select and run the right analysis as I look to take on more research would be nice.

Cheers!

 

[fed2]

school isn't a place for smart people. if you must though, biostats basically breaks down into epidemiology/public health (ie population level issues) and bioinformatics (computers and proteins etc.). so many programs will reflect that split.

 

[suckatstats]

Yeah, I'm not chomping at the bit for more school, but a structured path to learn stats would help. Heh, might just start with watching all of the StatQuest videos and go from there.

 

[hlsmith]

Nothing beats self-study. I continuously self-study. Read journal articles, books, watch YouTube videos, and read tweets. In addition, there are MOOCs (Edx and Coursera where you can audit MOOCs), and MIT has many open lectures recorded. With the internet and drive, you can learn anything. Also, engage in hands on experiences if you have work data that you are allow to process.

I would make sure you make progress before doing too much statistical analyses that have actionable results or people making decisions based on them. Clinicians will easily trust whatever you say or push you to double dip into your data. So it is good to know all the fundamental to ensure you aren't contributing to the replicability crisis.

 

[noetsi]

Having spent much of my life in school I am not sold on it to learn complex things. But its advantage if you are not brilliant like some here - like hlsmith for example - is you can self learn wrong. This is my great fear. I learn lots of things I find out here are not correct.

If you have a professor at least they can tell you if what you learn is accurate or not [although I earned a Master's in Measurement and Statistics under that logic and it did not in fact help much since little of the material is what I needed]. You may also need the piece of paper.

Duke and UCLA [IDRE] has tons of on line stuff on statistics. Some classes are also on line.