Short Courses

Registrations are now closed.

Most diseases and disorders require ongoing, tailored treatment that adapts to an individual’s needs and responses. Yet, evidence for effective treatment is often produced at one point in time. That is, the gold standard of evidence, a...

Registrations are now closed.

Missing data are a common problem in health research that can lead to bias if there is a violation in the assumptions about the causes of missing data that underlie (implicitly or explicitly) the analysis. Yet, the...

Registrations are now closed.

Methods to make causal inferences from observational data have advanced rapidly over the last 25 years. Specifying a hypothetical ‘target’ randomised trial, whose results our observational study aims to emulate, clarifies...

Many health research questions concern the multiple pathways that are presumed to mediate a relationship between an exposure and an outcome. Very often, the translational intent of such research questions is to inform potential intervention targets. However, the usual causal mediation approaches do not consider...

This course provides a deeper understanding of the main concepts, quantities and models in the analysis of time-to-event data. We explain the different types of censored and truncated data and the assumptions behind the basic estimation methods. The basic Cox proportional hazards model is extended...

Presented by: Thao Le, Ronald Geskus, Julie Simpson, Megha Rajasekhar and Rory Wolfe

This course provides an introduction to prognostic modelling in the context of health care research. It covers important principles for model development, internal and external validation, and the use of machine...

Please note the change of venue to Seminar room 515, Level 5, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, 207 Bouverie St Carlton.

In this workshop, we provide a brief, non-technical introduction to the basic steps of clinical...

In this era of “data science” it is vitally important to clearly articulate the questions that we ask of data, understand the challenges inherent in answering different types of questions, and ensure that our analysis methods are suitably aligned. An overwhelming number of clinical...

Cluster randomised trials are often conducted when randomising individuals to treatments isn’t possible. This can occur when the treatment is delivered at the cluster level, but we still measure outcomes on individuals. For example, if we want to assess the impact of a new...

This workshop gives an introduction to topical issues in the use of prediction models in health. The application of both regression models and machine learning approaches to the process of prediction model development for individuals will be discussed and illustrated with practical computing exercises in...

Network meta-analysis is an extension to pairwise meta-analysis that synthesizes evidence about the relative effects of many competing interventions in a single model. Network meta-analysis can also be used to estimate the ranking of the hierarchy of the interventions according to their safety or effectiveness....

Many epidemiological questions concern the pathways that are presumed to mediate a relationship between a cause and its effect. Very often, the translational intent of such research questions is to inform potential intervention targets. However, until recently causal mediation analysis methods did not define mediation...

In this era of “data science” it is vitally important to clearly articulate the questions that we ask of data, understand the challenges inherent in answering different types of questions, and ensure that our analysis methods are suitably aligned. An overwhelming number of clinical and...

The Victorian Centre for Biostatistics (ViCBiostat) will offer two exciting new courses in the 2020 edition of its Summer School.

In this era of “data science” it is vitally important to clearly articulate the...

Effective treatment of chronic diseases and disorders typically requires ongoing interventions where clinicians sequentially make therapeutic decisions, adapting the type, dosage and timing of treatment according to evolving patient characteristics. The framework of dynamic treatment regimens (DTRs) or adaptive interventions formalizes this sequential decision-making process...

The ViCBiostat Summer School is back in 2019, this time in partnership with the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance (ACTA). Each program is designed to provide an intensive introduction to a range of intermediate to advanced statistical methods that...

The assessment of risk of bias in randomized trials (RCTs) and non-randomized studies of interventions (NRSI) has evolved substantially in recent years. These changes are reflected in newly available tools (ROB 2.0 for randomized trials and ROBINS-I for NRSI; see www.riskofbias.info ). These new tools...

This year our Summer School is in conjunction with Cancer Council Victoria to present a five day Melbourne program.

Monday and Tuesday will be a course on meta-analysis methods presented by ViCBiostat. These can be taken together or as single day options. Wednesday, Thursday...

ViCBiostat is hosting respected speaker Professor Elizabeth Stuart from Johns Hopkins University who will present this one-day workshop.

Propensity scores are an increasingly common tool for estimating the effects of interventions in observational (“non-experimental”) settings and for answering complex questions in randomized controlled trials....

The inaugural ViCBiostat Winter School will commence in June this year with a 5 day Melbourne program, designed to provide an intensive introduction to a range of intermediate to advanced statistical methods that are important in modern health...

This year our Summer School is back on the road, with a three-day program in Melbourne followed by a two-day program in Sydney. Each program is designed to provide an intensive introduction to a range of intermediate to...

This year we are taking our Summer School on the road, with a two-day program in Adelaide, followed by a five-day program in Melbourne. Each program is designed to provide an intensive introduction to a range of intermediate...

Studying the mechanisms that explain the connections between exposures and outcomes, commonly known as “mediation analysis”, has a long history in social science and economics and has appeared more recently with increasing frequency in epidemiological research. The standard approach for constructing inferences for parameters in...

Many important clinical questions are difficult to answer with a classically designed randomised controlled trial. Using innovative trial designs has the potential to increase the efficiency and capacity for conducting high quality trials. This one-day workshop will include presentations, discussions and clinical examples of alternative...

DAY 1. Causal inference: concepts and methods

The past two decades has seen the emergence of a coherent theory of causal inference much of which is now being translated into practice. Causal concepts are increasingly being used in the design of studies and...

Censored data are common in medical studies. Survival time is a simple example. Recurrent events and paired interval-censored data (including detection limit as a special case) are more complex forms of censored data. The former include, for example, multiple disease episodes, hospitalizations, and injuries; the...

With the growing availability of large healthcare databases, non-experimental studies of prescription medications are becoming increasingly common.

However, appropriate design and analysis of such studies can be challenging. In this workshop we provide an intensive introduction to the field of pharmacoepidemiology.

We review...