20 – Additional topics

Introduction

Biostatistics covers a wide variety of applied topics. This final chapter contains brief annotations and R script for the following additional topics:

  • Area under the curve: A geometric measurement used to calculate the total cumulative value or exposure of a variable over a specific period of time.
  • Peak detection: The computational process of identifying local maxima or significant signal spikes within a dataset, often used in signal processing and chromatography.
  • Baseline correction: A data-preprocessing technique that removes low-frequency background noise or systematic drift from a signal to isolate true analytical peaks.
  • Surveys: A data collection method used to gather structured information, opinions, or self-reported behaviors from a specific sample of individuals.
  • Time series: A sequence of data points recorded at successive, chronological, and typically equal time intervals to analyze temporal trends and patterns.
  • Dimensional analysis: A problem-solving method in science and engineering that uses the units of measurement to verify the correctness of mathematical equations.
  • Estimating population size: A statistical or demographic method used to determine the total number of individuals in a specific group or species based on sample data.
  • Diversity indexes: Mathematical measures that quantify the biodiversity of an ecosystem by factoring in both the total number of unique species and their relative abundance.
  • Survival analysis: A branch of statistics used to model and analyze the time expected to elapse before a specific event of interest occurs, such as a system failure or death.
  • Growth equations and dose response calculations: Mathematical models used to describe how a biological organism grows over time or how it changes in response to varying concentrations of a chemical or drug.
  • Plot a Newick tree: The visual rendering of evolutionary relationships among species using a standard text-based string format that captures branching patterns and leaf names.
  • Phylogenetically independent contrasts: A statistical method used to analyze correlations between traits across different species by removing the confounding effects of their shared evolutionary history.
  • How to get the distances from a distance tree: A process of extracting the numerical branch lengths between specific nodes or species to determine their relative evolutionary divergence.
  • Binary classification: A machine learning task that predicts which of two distinct, mutually exclusive groups a given data point belongs to.
  • Meta-analysis: A quantitative statistical procedure that combines and contrasts findings from multiple independent scientific studies to determine an overall, comprehensive trend.

Chapter 20 contents

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