Statistical Practice in Epidemiology using R.

Course from Thursday 14 to Wednesday 20 June 2018
Lyon, France

Organized by the International Agency for Research on Cancer
The course starts early morning Thursday 14 June, so arrival in Lyon must be on Wednesday 13 June.
The course ends Wednesday at 14:00, so departure will be possible on Wednesday (flights from Lyon later than 18:00 can be reached).
Similar courses were given every year since 2000 with the exception of 2003 and 2008; mostly in Tartu Estonia.

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.
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. Particular attention will be given to the reporting of the results; in particular the use of graphics.

Faculty:

Krista Fischer, Senior researcher, Estonian Genome Center, University of Tartu, Estonia.

Esa Läärä, Professor of Biometry, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Oulu, Finland.
Janne Pitkäniemi, Chief Statistician, Finnish Cancer Registry, Helsinki, Finland & Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland .
Bendix Carstensen, Senior Statistician, Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen, Gentofte & Department of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Maintainer of the Epi package.
Martyn Plummer, Senior Statistician, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France. Member of the R core team.

Course fee

Academic: 700 EUR, Non-academic 950 EUR

Application deadline: 8th April 2018

Venue: International Agency for Research on Cancer

IARC course site
IARC course flyer
IARC course application form

Course program and instructions:

Download the latest version of R (currently 3.5.0) (here, for example), and install it.
Install the R-package Epi, currently in version 2.30 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 2.26. This requires that your computer is connected to the net.
The latest version of the Epi package may be obtained from here and install it.
Install the R-packages mgcv, data.table, popEpi and epitools by starting R and then typing:
> install.packages("mgcv")
> 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.
It may also be of interest to install the package eha too.
If you are not very familiar with R, here is a draft version of a short introduction to R, aimed at an uninitiated audience.
Concepts in survival and demography is a brief account of basic concepts and their relationships.
Spline demonstration written by Paul Lambert, University of Leicester.
Slides as 3-ups
Practicals
folder with datasets used, or as zip

Last updated 22 December 2017, BxC