Statistical Modelling for Evidence-Based Public Health

This book presents a selection of statistical techniques and methods applied to analyze data arising from HIV/AIDS epidemiology, as well as child and maternal health. Evidence-based decision-making in public health interventions requires appropriate techniques applied to solve relevant statistical and epidemiological questions, which would, in turn, bring out relevant outputs for action. The different chapters assembled in this book, address various methodological challenges when analyzing HIV/AIDS, child and maternal health data. These include data issues for handling correlated outcomes and repeated measurements generated through longitudinal or follow-up processes, spatial-temporal correlation, measurement error, missingness, co-morbidity, survival analysis, detection of outlying health outcomes, and joint occurrences of outcomes. Essential approaches that enhance statistical science, are presented, when dealing with variable and model selection. Each chapter motivates the problem, provides details of the relevant bio-statistical methods used to tackle the problem, applies the methods to the data, and offers some epidemiological or public health recommendations. Readers can replicate the methods to their data, and R command codes are supplied at the end of each chapter.