Statistical Practice in Epidemiology using R.

Monday 3 June - Friday 7 June, 2024
at IARC in Lyon, France

The course starts early morning Monday, so arrival in Lyon must be on Sunday.
The course ends on Friday at 14:00.
Similar courses were given every year since 2000 with the exception of 2003, 2008 and 2020-2022. Place Terreaux

Audience

The course is intended for epidemiologists and statisticians who wish to use R for statistical modelling and analysis of epidemiological data.
The aim of the course is to give young statisticians (or not so young epidemiologists) who wish to enter or who has recently entered biostatistics or epidemiology access to a set of tools in current use by statisticians in epidemiology.
Place Bellecour

The course requires basic knowledge of epidemiological concepts and study types. These will only be briefly reviewed, whereas the more advanced epidemiological and statistical concepts will be treated in depth.

History of R. Language. Objects. Functions.
Interface to other dataformats. Dataframes.
Tabulation of data.
Logistic regression for case-control-studies.
Poisson regression for follow-up studies.
Causal inference.
Parametrization of models.
Graphics in R.
Graphical reporting of results.
Time-splitting & SMR.
Nested and matched case-control studies.
Case-cohort studies.
Survival analysis in continuous time.
Competing risk models and relative survival.
Multistate models.

All methods will be thoroughly illustrated using R in practical exercises.
The Epi package which is developed for epidemiological analysis in R will be introduced.
Special attention will be given to the reporting of the results; in particular the use of graphics.

Faculty:

Janne Pitkäniemi, Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, University of Tampere, Finland
Director, Finnish Cancer Registry, Helsinki, Finland
Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, Finland
Damien Georges, Senior Research assistant, Early Detection, Prevention, and Infections Branch,
International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France.
Bendix Carstensen, Senior Statistician, Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen & Department of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Maintainer of the Epi package.
Krista Fischer, Professor, Institute of Mathematics and Statistics and Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia
Esa Läärä, Professor emeritus of Biometry, Research Unit of Mathematical Sciences, University of Oulu, Finland.
Martyn Plummer, Professor of Statistics, University of Warwick, UK. Member of the R core team.

The entire faculty will be present through most of the course, so the course has an unusually large faculty / student ratio.

Venue

IARC, Lyon

Course fee:

academic participants: 1000 EUR
non-academic participants: 1200 EUR

Includes course, access to course material, coffee breaks and catered social events.
Excludes transport, accommodation and meals (onsite cafeteria available with a range of inexpensive lunch options).
The course is a self-supporting entity, and there are NO grants or stipends available for travel or participation.

Apply here

Course material and instructions:

Make sure you have the latest version of R 4.4.0 (here, for example), and install it.
Install the R-package Epi, from here or by starting R and then typing:
> install.packages("Epi")
at the command prompt in R. If you have an older version of Epi, then update to version 2.50.
Install the R-packages data.table, popEpi and epitools by starting R and then typing:
> install.packages("data.table")
> install.packages("popEpi")
> install.packages("epitools")
at the command prompt in R. This requires that your computer is connected to the net.
Concepts in survival and demography is a brief account of basic concepts and their relationships.

Last updated 31 May 2024, BxC