Main description:

This volume presents the results of biological and medical research with the statistical methods used to obtain them. Nowadays the fields of biology and experimental medicine rely on techniques for processing of experimental data and for the evaluation of hypotheses. It is increasingly necessary to stimulate awareness of the importance of statistical techniques (and of the possible traps that they can hide) by using real data in concrete situations drawn from research activity.

Contents:

1. Some reflections on the current state of statistics.- 2. Answering two biological questions with a latent class model via MCMC applied to capture-recapture data.- 3. On the Bayesian inference of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium model.- 4. Identifying a Bayesian Network for the problem "Hospital and families: the analysis of patient satisfaction with their stay in hospital".- 5. Reliability of GIST diagnosis based on partial information.- 6. Comparing two groups or treatments-a Bayesian approach.- 7. Two experimental settings in clinical trials: predictive criteria for choosing the sample size in interval estimation.- 8. Attributing a paleoanthropological specimen to a prehistoric population: a Bayesian approach with multivariate B-spline functions.- 9. An example of the subjectivist statistical method for learning from data: Why do whales strand when they do?.- 10. Development and communication of Bayesan methodology for medical device clinical trials.- 11. An adaptive SIR algorithm for Bayesian multilevel inference on categorical data.- 12. Age at death diagnosis by cranial suture obliteration: a Bayesian approach.- 13. Bayesian estimation of restriction fragment length from electrophoretic analysis.