Course

Introduction to Statistics and Probability for Infectious Diseases

This course is Part 3 of a 5-part course series designed for public health professionals, data scientists, epidemiologists, healthcare workers, policy makers, and anyone interested in infectious disease modelling, outbreak response, and gender-responsive data analysis.

Overview

Course on Statistical Thinking for Infectious Disease Modelling using R, tailored to Africa, with hands-on practice & gender lens.

Participants will take on the role of community health detectives, learning how statistical thinking underpins infectious disease research and modelling. Through practical tasks and interactive datasets, they will explore how statistics help understand uncertainty in data, disease spread, and prevention effectiveness. This unit introduces foundational concepts such as descriptive statistics, probability, common probability distributions, and statistical inference, with applications to epidemiology and outbreak response.

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand the role of statistics in the study of infectious diseases.
  • Understand and use statistical measures to summarize and analyze information.
  • Become familiar with the concept of a random variable and recognize common probability distributions.
  • Learn how to approach a statistical problem as an inference problem from a sample.
  • Understand the concept of confidence intervals for estimating epidemiological parameters.

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