Basic Concepts, Organizing, and Displaying Data

Abstract

This chapter introducesbiostatistics as a discipline that deals with designing studies, analyzingdata, and developing new statistical techniques to address the problems in the fields of life sciences. This includes collection, organization, summarization, and analysis of data in the fields of biological, health, and medical sciences including other life sciences. One major objective of a biostatistician is to find the values that summarize the basic facts from the sample data and to makeinference about the representativeness of the estimates using the sample data to make inference about the correspondingpopulation characteristics. The basic concepts are discussed along with examples and sources of data, levels ofmeasurement, and types of variables. Various methods of organizing and displaying data are discussed for both ungrouped andgrouped data. The construction of table is discussed in details. This chapter includes methods of constructing frequency bar chart, dot plot, pie chart,histogram,frequency polygon, andogive. In addition, the construction ofstem-and-leaf display is discussed in details. All these are illustrated with examples. As the raw materials ofstatistics aredata, a brief section on designing of sample surveys including planning of a survey and major components is introduced in order to provide some background about collection of data.