BIOSTATISTICS REVIEWER
Match the term with its features/descriptions.
A person without disease classified as with disease. In place of disease, false positivity can be for any
other attribute
Answer 1
False positive
A person with disease classified as without disease. In place of disease, false negativity can be for any
other attribute.
Answer 2
False negative
The result stating that the chance of a summative measure such as sample mean following a Gaussian
distribution rapidly increases in almost all practical situations as the number of individuals in a sample
increases (i.e., sample size becomes large).
Answer 3
Central Limit Theorem
The remaining portion of life at any age that would be spent without any morbidity
Answer 4
Healthy life expectancy
The set of words that describes the essential features of a study.
Answer 5
Keywords
How well the actual observations fit into a specified pattern.
Answer 6
Goodness of fit
A non parametric test for comparing central tendency in three or more groups.
Answer 7
Kuskal-Wallis test
Inverse of the standard error of the estimate or a derivative of this inverse.
Answer 8
Efficiency of an estimate
Variety of causes of death: some people meet death slowly such as by cancer, and some sudden such as
by myocardial infarction.
Answer 9
Death spectrum
The statistical procedure to discover a construct out of data that can possibly explain the variation and
relationship among different variables.
Answer 10
Factor analysis
An international organisation of producers and consumers of medical research that helps to clarify the
research achievements, particularly health care interventions such as drugs, diet alteration and behavior
change
Answer 11
Cochrane Collaboration
A summary of the death and survival pattern of a group of people—generally for the entire population
of an area, but can be used for patients of a particular disease also.
Answer 12
Life table
The statistical procedure to classify units or individuals into groups such that the units are similar
within each group but dissimilar across groups: generally used when the number and nature of the
groups are not known.
Answer 13
Cluster analysis
The first could be called missed diagnosis and the second as misdiagnosis. In place of healthy/diseased
this could be any other categorization.
Answer 14
Misclassification
An extraneous factor that could be an explanation of the outcome of interest in addition to the factor
under study so that its effect can not be differentiated from the other: such as dietary factors when
examining relationship between smoking and cervical cancer. Presence of unaccounted confounders
decreases the validity of a study.
Answer 15
Confounder
The tendency of getting poor output or poor outcome when the inputs or efforts are poor.
Answer 16
Garbage-in, garbage-out syndrome
The set of characteristics such as age, disease and severity, which are necessary in a subject to be
considered eligible for inclusion in the study.
Answer 17
Inclusion criteria
The probability of occurrence of an event such as disease when some a-priori information such as signsymptoms are known: denoted by P(A/B) where after slash (/) sign is what is known a-priori.
Answer 18
Conditional probability
A prospective study of a cohort for a specified period, generally to observe the occurrence of an
outcome of interest, and thereby determine the incidence.
Answer 19
Cohort study
Identification data of a document containing the authors‘ name, title, publication name, volume,
publication date, page numbers, etc.
Answer 20
Citation
The process of reaching to a decision after considering probabilities of various outcomes and value
judgments regarding the utility of those outcomes.
Answer 21
Decision analysis
The frequency of desired outcome per unit of resource inputs such as time, money and manpower.
Answer 22
Efficiency
A procedure of combining evidence in different reports on the same aspect. If different trials on the
same regimen report varying efficacy, they can be combined to come to a unified conclusion, which
may command substantially more confidence than result of any one of the individual trials.
Answer 23
Meta-analysis
A less scientific but a quick method to arrive at a consensus among experts.
Answer 24
Delphi method
A trial with the objective to examine if a new regimen is different from another regimen by more than a
prespecified medically unimportant margin.
Answer 25
Equivalence trial