StATS: Frank Harrell's Philosophy of Biostatistics (created 2006-10-10)

There are a lot of people in the world who are a lot smarter than I am and it is always a humbling experience when I recognize how little I really know.

Frank Harrell, chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University, is one of those people. He has a book,

that should be required reading for any statistician who is planning to develop a regression model. It covers all the new things that I know I should be using, but that I have been too lazy to check out. It's not for a beginner, but if you have some experience with regression models and want to learn how to use the best state of the art methods, there is no better place to look.

A reminder of how important all of this stuff is appears on Dr. Harrell's website:

where he outlines his philosophy of biostatistics. It is well worth repeating here, and each bullet point needs to be expanded on

A good elaboration of the third bullet point appears at

which outlines the issue far better than anything I have written on the topic.

This page was written by Steve Simon while working at Children's Mercy Hospital. Although I do not hold the copyright for this material, I am reproducing it here as a service, as it is no longer available on the Children's Mercy Hospital website. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Category: Modeling issues.