Preface

“Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
William Osler (1849-1919).

Biostatistics is a fundamental discipline at the core of modern health data science (Lee et al, 2019). As the science of managing medical uncertainty, biostatistical methods play a key role in the scientific assessment of all areas of medical practice: from aetiology to diagnosis and from treatment to prognosis.

This script is based on a series of lectures in Clinical Biostatistics that I gave at the University of Zurich for Master Students in Biostatistics and PhD students in Clinical Science and related subjects. It is a living document and we intend to update and extend the contents on a regular basis. Please report any errors or comments you might have to .

Many of the examples and analyses are using the R package biostatUZH, developed by the Department of Biostatistics at Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute. Installation can be done by running the following command in R console.

remotes::install_github(repo = "EBPI-Biostatistics/biostatUZH", build_vignettes = TRUE)

Leonhard Held, December 2025

2025-12-03

References

Lee, K J, Moreno‐Betancur, M, Kasza, J, Marschner, I C, Barnett, A G, and Carlin, J B 2019 Biostatistics: A fundamental discipline at the core of modern health data science. Medical Journal of Australia, 211(10): 444. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50372