Teachers: Therese Andersson, Anna Johansson, Elisavet (Betty) Syriopoulou, Frida Lundberg.

Course director and examiner: Therese Andersson.
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Teaching (lectures and supervised practical sessions) will be held in room Marie at Widerströmska huset and room Wargentin at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. More information will be sent to course participants prior to the course start. Also see the schedule for further details.

The course grade is based solely on a take-home written examination. The exam requires you to understand the concepts of survival analysis and interpret output from standard statistical software. Instructions:

• The examination is individual-based: you are not allowed to cooperate with anyone, although you are encouraged to consult the available literature. The teachers will use Urkund in order to assess potential plagiarism
• The examination will be made available at 12:00 on Wednesday 14 February 2024 and the examination is due by 17:00 on Wednesday 21 February 2024.
• The examination will be graded and results will be returned to you by 6 March 2024.
• Students who do not obtain a passing grade in the first examination will be offered a second examination within 2 months of the final day of the course.
• Do not write answers by hand: please use Word, R markdown, LaTeX or a similar format for your examination report.
• Motivate all answers and show all calculations in your examination report, but write as concise an answer as possible without loss of clarity. Define any notation that you use for equations. The examination report should be written in English.
• Email the examination report containing the answers as a pdf file to Gunilla Nilsson Roos. Write your name in the email, but do not write your name in the document containing the answers.

Participants are expected to have prerequisite knowledge equivalent to the learning outcomes of the courses Epidemiology I, Biostatistics I and Biostatistics II. We have provided a self-assessment test for you to confirm that you understand the central concepts. We advise all potential applicants to take the test prior to applying for Biostatistics III. If you attempt the test under examination conditions (i.e., without referring to the answers) we would recommend:

1. if you score 70% or more then you possess the required prerequisite knowledge;
2. if you score 40% to 70% you should revise the areas where you lost marks;
3. if you score less than 40% you should, at a minimum, undertake an extensive review of central concepts in statistical modelling and possibly consider studying intermediate-level courses (e.g., Biostatistics II) before taking Biostatistics III.

Participants are expected to possess basic knowledge of Stata prior to the start of the course. If you have not used Stata, please work through the Introduction to Stata document and the practice questions in section 3. We will use Stata 16 during the course, although will not rely on any of the new Stata features. That is, you will be able to do almost all of the exercises in Stata versions 11 through 16.

Although we will be using Stata exclusively during the course, we have made the data sets available in R and SAS formats and users are welcome to attempt the exercises using R or SAS. Please keep in mind that if you choose to work with R or SAS we expect you to be familiar with those softwares. The teaching assistants can help with the statistical concepts and some are experienced R and SAS users.

We have written brief notes on how the methods described during the course can be implemented in SAS (see notes\_for\_sas\_users.pdf). There is a separate R version of this course, and some of the material from that course is available.

The course language will be English. All instruction and course materials will be in English.