Mathematical biostatistics camp is an online course on Coursera taught by Brian Caffo. It’s a good introduction to the field. I highly recommend it for for newcomers. However, it only scratches the surface of many important and deep topics. Luckily, Brian gave several references to learn more about the subjects and he has also been actively putting materials and courses online. On courera, there are only multi-choice quiz after each lecture. The good part is that those are freely available for those who don’t want to pay for certificates. It would be more helpful if there are more challenging problems or programming assignments. I summarized below some interesting or useful things Brian brought up throughout the course.

People and their stories

Francis Galton

Francis Galton(1982-1911) was an very interesting character who was fanatic about measuring all sorts of things. He pioneered in statistics and other fields of science. In this course, he was mentioned several times for his creation/discovery of regression to the mean and his quincunx (aka bean machine). He also coined the term eugenics.

William Gosset

William Gosset(1876-1937) used pseudonym “student” published his “student t test”.

Ronald Fisher vs George Alfred Barnard

Fisher(1890-1962) was the founder of the modern statics. In this course, he was mentioned for his exact test, which is motivated by the “lady testing tea” problem. Brian found it interesting to dig the literature to read about the fight between Fisher and Barnard over the exact test.

John Tukey

John Tukey(1915-2000) is another influential figure in modern statistics. In this course we see steam leaf and boxplots both accredited to him. as well as his pioneered work in the development of bootstrap. He’s also known for coining the term bit and development of Fast Fourier Algorithm.

Larry Wasserman

His blog article on Simpson’s paradox was mentioned. In general, I find it very interesting blog. Unfortunately it seems no longer updated. There are many other good blogs written by statisticians. I have a plan to write a post to curate them.

Brian Caffo

We must have a spot here to thank the instructor of this course. Brian Caffo is a professor in biostat in JHK. He has been active putting learning materials and advices online for students in statistics and machine learning. Check out his YouTube Channel.

Books

Lady tasting tea

My favorite book on statistic for general public. The book starts with the famous story of lady tasting tea, that is, how to design a experiment to test whether the lady can tell the difference between tea poured into milk tastes and milk poured into tea. The genius minds and their stories who revolutionized science and statistics were depicted in a vivid way. Reading the history of the development of statistics or science in general is very beneficial and inspirational.

The History of Statistics

This book is about the history of statistic before 1900. It serves an complement to the book “the Lady tasting tea” which is focused stories in 20th century.

Textbooks

Throughout the course, several good book recommendations were made for students looking to learn in-depth material. In fact, many examples in this course were drew from the those books. They are:

• Fundamentals of Biostatistics
• An introduction to bootstrap
• Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis
• Categorical Data Analysis

I have not read any of the books yet. I plan to write some book reviews after reading those.

Objects

The 100-side die actually exists. You can also play Galton’s bean machine on this site.

Movie

The adventures of Baron Manchse was mentioned for its line “pull someone out of one’s own bootstrap” which inspired the name of the resampling method bootstrap. Brian said it’s a good movie.