Biostatistics: A Methodology For the Health Sciences (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics)

The authors write well and cover most of the important topics very thoroughly. They motivate the subject very well with a number of important and "real world" examples in the first chapter. A unique feature is its detailed coverage of sample size determination in a number of contexts. The book was published in 1993 which is not recent enough to cover advances in meta analysis, resampling, Bayesian Hierarchical Models (with Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods) and frailty models. At least bootstrap methods and meta analyses are mentioned in the book. Noteworthy are the full chapters on multiple comparison problems and discriminant analysis. This is an excellent reference book for biostatisticians. This review was based on the first edition of the text. Since it is now listed under the second edition and amazon does not let reviewers review the same title twice I am adding my review of the second edition that I recently purchased and read through. The second edition is as good if not better than the first. The only disadvantage is the high price and availability currently only in hard cover whereas the fist edition was in paperback. The book is still elementary and covers the basics but it is expanded over the first edition, includes two new authors and some new chapters. As the first edition came out around 1993 and this one was published in 2004 there have been significant additions to the literature on biostatistics and the authors have carefully updated the reference sections. The two new and very important chapters cover randomized clinical trials and logitudinal data anlaysis. These are both extremely important topics for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Advances in statistical computing, robust statistics, model building and discriminant analysis are all covered in this text. Much of the great aspects of the first edition were preserved and the excellent writing style of van Belle and Fisher remains in this edition.