This is the 8 th volume in the series “Handbook of Statistics”, for which the main purpose is the dissemination of statistical methodologies in the area of biological and medical sciences. The chapters are written by specialists with considerable experience in the applications of statistical techniques for investigating biological issues.
The chapters of this volume, divided into four parts, illustrate some recent work in the field of biometrics. In the first part, five chapters discuss some genetic and epidemiological problems: the use of the concepts of logistic regression and the LISREL model; the important class of distributions called weighted distributions; the important method of path analysis, which is strictly a causal structural analysis of dependence between variables; the statistical tools of estimation and hypothesis testing which play a significant role in human linkage analysis; a synopsis of current trends of epidemiological research, as the application of categorical data analysis.
The next six chapters in Part II cover applications of statistics in anthropology and evolutionary biology: the classic problem of identification and discrimination with multiple observations; the classic problem of population genetics and the analysis of population structures showing that a decomposition of diversity indices is a special form of Categorical Analysis of Variance (CATANOVA); the determination of biological relationships between individuals from genetic data and, the last, statistical models for sex ratio evolution.
The next two chapters in Part III are related to the area of cancer biology: stochastic models of carcinogenesis and applications of score methodology to confidence interval estimation.
Part IV contains three chapters that deal with the subject of medical statistics: point estimation of survival functions; confidence interval estimation of survival functions using a decision theoretic approach; and the sample size determination in clinical research.
Most of the chapters discuss the statistical principles in conjunction with specific applications, and open problems that might lead to further work on these subjects are emphasized.