Mike’s Biostatistics Book

 

cover image Mike's Biostatistics Book. The cover image is a manowar fractal generated in Fractal Explorer, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).

Mike’s Biostatistics Book is an eBook to support my Biostatistics course at Chaminade University (since 2009). The course had its origins at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo (2003 – 2005), and was inspired by a course of the same name taught by Don Price (now at UNLV). The progression and structure of this ebook follows my presentation in the course — BI-311 Biostatistics — these are my extended lecture notes. The companion site, Mike’s Workbook for Biostatistics, provides homework and simple projects to learn-by-doing biostatistics.

In September 2024, Mike’s Biostatistics Book was adopted LibreTexts.org for inclusion in their open textbook applied statistics library.

Mike’s Biostatistics Book is a work in progress; some chapters are complete, others, not so much. With each semester I add to and rewrite content. The draft of this eBook adopted by LibreTexts in Fall 2024 is at the level of version 0.99; We may as well then refer to this release of the book as version 1+. 

The BI311 course is typically offered in Fall semester; following the semester I update the text. Thus, since Fall 2024 I’ve added content, and since September 2024 I added several subchapters, added text to more than 50% of the pages, and have updated the book with proof-reading for typos, clarity and organization flow, a more complete index page to key words and a complete listing of all 400+ figures contained in the book. So far in Fall 2025, I updated instructions on use of R in Jupyter Notebooks and the cloud. New in Fall 2025, I’ve added about 900(!) true/false or multiple choice questions with immediate feedback — correct or incorrect — to accompany each subchapter. I have yet to complete a couple of sub-chapters in Chapter 19 and Chapter 20.

Thus, post LibreText.org adoption, this version of Mike’s Biostatistics Book hosted at my website is 1.89. Why not round to two? Let’s introduce our first statistics concept — precision. Because I’m not following a proscribed version control scheme eg, Git, there can be no claim that “1.89” is precise — that is, exact to the hundredths. We may as well then refer to this release of the book as version 2+. 

The cover image is a manowar fractal (now called “leaves” in 3.0.4 GIMP) generated in Fractal Explorer, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).

Text to speech — Google US English — is provided by WordPress plugin Text To Speech TTS Accessibility, free version.

Fall 2025

/MD