Abstract
Descriptive study is often used at the beginning of a project to examine a medical, health, or behavioral problem in public health and medicine. Although, it is common practice to describe a problem using words; quantitative epidemiology focuses on the application of descriptive statistical methods and visualization techniques for description. Information provided using a quantitative method is thus less subjective, and more concise and accurate than words. The commonly used descriptive statistics include sum, mean, standard deviation (SD), proportion, quantile, inter-quarter range (IQR), rate, ratio, and 95% confidence intervals; and the commonly used visualization techniques include histograms, pie charts, bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, and mapping. With these quantitative methods and techniques, numbers and figures are generated to describe the distribution of a medical, health, or behavioral problem in a population to assess who are at high risk by geographic area to locate the hot spots over time to assess temporal trends.
Current status informs future directions.
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Chen, X. (2021). Quantitative Descriptive Epidemiology. In: Quantitative Epidemiology. Emerging Topics in Statistics and Biostatistics . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83852-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83852-2_3
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