Basic principles of statistical consulting including how to manage a consulting session, how to formulate and solve problems and how to express results both orally and in writing. Students will be expected to analyze data from a current consulting project. Lecture, two hours; laboratory, two hours per week.

This course will involve students in small consulting projects intended to illustrate practical biostatistical problems.

Topics to be selected by STA faculty. May be repeated to a maximum of nine credits.

The Real Numbers (Natural Numbers and Induction, Ordered Fields, Ordered Fields, Topology of the Real Numbers, Compact Sets).

Basic concepts of decision theory, sufficiency and completeness; completeness of multiparametric exponential family; unbiasedness and invariance of decision rules; Bayes, minimax and invariant estimators; testing of hypotheses and optimality properties.

Probability spaces, extension theorem, random variables; independence, conditional probability, conditional expectation; laws of large numbers, law of the iterated logarithm; convergence in distribution; characteristic functions; central limit theorems; martingales.

Theory and data analysis involving likelihood functions, mixed models, missing responses.

Supervised reading and discussion of a selected research topic. May be repeated to a maximum of nine credits.

Supervised reading and discussion of a selected research topic. May be repeated to a maximum of nine credits.

Half-time to full-time work on thesis. May be repeated to a maximum of six semesters.