The future of biostatistics: expecting the unexpected

✍ Scribed by Hans C. Van Houwelingen

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 528 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0277-6715
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0258(19971230)16:24<2773::aid-sim761>3.0.co;2-q

✦ Synopsis

The paper explores the future of (clinical) biostatistics. In the first part of the paper important trends in biostatistics are reviewed: new applications and more complex data; causal models for observational data; cross-validation-based model building; graphical chain and random effect models; faster computing and new algorithms as Markov chain Monte Carlo; generalized estimating equations and pseudo-likelihood; pooled data sets for meta-analysis and prognostic modelling. In the second part some dreams and nightmares of the author are sketched. Dreams are: implementation of prognostic and diagnostic models in the clinic; an instantaneous numeric integrator; much more and better organized follow-up data; disease mapping in space and time. 'Nightmares', that is, issues which it is hoped will go out of use in the future, are: P-value; rank tests; exact methods; meta-analysis; matched case-control studies.