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Introduction to Bayesian Analysis for medical studies
Provider: Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences

Activity no.: 3333-19-00-00There are no available seats 
Enrollment deadline: 12/04/2019
Date and time13.05.2019, at: 08:00 - 15.05.2019, at: 15:00
Regular seats25
Course fee2,160.00 kr.
LecturersThomas Gerds
ECTS credits2.00
Contact personSusanne Kragskov Laupstad    E-mail address: skl@sund.ku.dk
Enrolment Handling/Course OrganiserPhD administration     E-mail address: phdkursus@sund.ku.dk

Aim and content
This is a generic course. This means that the course is reserved for PhD students at the Graduate School of Health and Medical Sciences at UCPH. Anyone can apply for the course, but if you are not a PhD student at the Graduate School, you will be placed on the waiting list until enrollment deadline. After the enrolment deadline, available seats will be allocated to the waiting list.

The course is free of charge for PhD students at Danish and Nordic universities (except Copenhagen Business School). All other participants must pay the course fee.

Course title
Introduction to Bayesian Analysis for medical studies
Learning objectives
A student who has met the objectives of the course will be able to:
1. understand and assess a Bayesian modelling strategy, and discuss its underlying assumptions
2. understand and explain an adaptive design for Phase I/II trials and the associated decision-rule
3. perform a Bayesian meta-analysis using R
4. rigorously describe expert knowledge by a quantitative prior distribution
5. put into perspective the results from a Bayesian analysis

Content
Bayesian analysis is a statistical tool that is becoming increasingly popular in medical science. Notably,
Bayesian approaches have become commonly used in adaptive designs for Phase I/II trials, in metaanalyses,
and also in transcriptomics analysis. This course provides an introduction to Bayesian tools, with
an emphasis on biostatistics applications, in order to familiarize students with such methods and their
practical applications. Thanks to its rich modelling possibilities the Bayesian framework is appealing,
especially when the number of observations is scarce. It can adaptively incorporate information as it
becomes available, an important feature for early phase clinical trials. Thus, adaptive Bayesian designs for
Phase I/II trials reduce the chances of unnecessarily exposing participants to inappropriate doses and have
better decision-making properties compared to the standard rule-based dose-escalation designs. Besides,
the use of a Bayesian approach is also very appealing in meta-analyses because of: i) the often relatively
small number of studies available, ii) its flexibility, iii) and its better handling of heterogeneity from
aggregated results, especially in network meta-analyses. Thanks to modern computing tools, practical
Bayesian analysis has become relatively straightforward, which is contributing to its increasing popularity.
JAGS is a flexible software interfaced with R, that allows to easily specify a Bayesian model and that
automatically perform inference for posterior parameters distributions as well as graphic outputs to
monitor the quality of the analysis.

The aim of the course is to provide insights into Bayesian statistics in the context of medical studies. We
will cover the following topics: i) Bayesian modeling (prior, posterior, likelihood, Bayes theorem); ii)
Bayesian estimation (Credibility Intervals, Maximum a Posteriori, Bayes factor); iv) Adaptive designs for
Phase I/II trials; v) Bayesian meta-analyses; vi) Practical Bayesian Analysis with R and JAGS softwares; vii)
critical reading of medical publications. All concepts will be illustrated with real-life examples from the
medical literrature.

Participants
This course is targeted towards medical students in graduate programms at the Faculty of Health and
Medical Sciences. To be able to follow this course, parcticipants do not need mathematical training as we
will explain the methods on an elementary mathematical level, however knowledge in basic statistics is
required (most notably some familiarity with Maximum Likelihood Estimation). During the (computer)
practicals the students will learn how to technically apply the Bayesian tools on real data. Note that several
statistical software can be used for Bayesian analysis, however solutions will be provided for the statistical
softwares R and JAGS only (alternatives such as WinBUGS or STAN will not be covered). Thus, some basic
knowledge in the free statistical language R is useful.

Relevance to graduate programmes
The course is relevant to PhD students from the following graduate programmes at the Graduate School of
Health and Medical Sciences, UCPH:
Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
Public Health and Epidemiology
All graduate programmes

Language
English

Form
Lectures, exercises, scientific article discussions and computer practices

Course director
Thomas Gerds, Professor, University of Copenhagen, tag@biostat.ku.dk

Teachers
Boris Hejblum, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Bordeaux

Dates
13, 14 and 15 May 2019 (2.5 days)

Course location
CSS

Registration
Please register before 12 April 2018

Seats to PhD students from other Danish universities will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and
according to the applicable rules.
Applications from other participants will be considered after the last day of enrolment.

Note: All applicants are asked to submit invoice details in case of no-show, late cancellation or obligation to pay the course fee (typically non-PhD students). If you are a PhD student, your participation in the course must be in agreement with your principal supervisor.

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