Statistical science plays an important role in medical research. Indeed a major part of the key to the progress in medicine from the 17th century to the present day has been the collection and valid interpretation of empirical evidence provided by the application of statistical methods to medical studies. And during the last few decades, the use of statistical techniques in medical research has grown more rapidly than in any other field of application. Indeed, some branches of statistics have been especially stimulated by their applications in medical investigations, notably the analysis of survival data (see, for example, Collett 2003). But why has statistics (and statisticians) become so important in medicine? Some possible answers are:
Medical practice and medical research generate large amounts of data. Such data can be full of uncertainty and variation and extracting the “signal,” i.e. the substantive medical message in the data, form the ‘noise’ is usually anything but trivial.
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Everitt, B.S. (2011). Medical Research, Statistics in. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_90
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