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Biostatistics

Biostatistics, most generally, is the application of statistics to biology
and, most commonly, to medicine. Because research questions in biology and
medicine are various, biostatistics has expanded its domain to include any
quantitative, not just statistical, models that may be used to answer these questions.

Programs in biostatistics are almost exclusively post-baccalaureate (i.e.,
found in graduate schools). They are most often found in schools of public
health, affiliated with schools of medicine, or as a focus of application in
departments of statistics.

As a discipline designed to yield information, biostatistics may be
considered as one (highly-developed) branch of medical informatics, which,
in turn, may be encompassed by the newer field of bioinformatics.

Consequently, biostatistics draws quantitative methods from fields such as:

   * statistics,
   * operations research,
   * economics, and, generally,
   * mathematics

and it is applied to research questions in fields such as:

   * public health, which includes epidemiology, nutrition, environmental
     health, and health services research,
   * genomics and population genetics,
   * medicine,
   * ecology,
   * bioassay, and
   * agriculture.

Finally, the terms, biostatistics and biometry, appear to be
interchangeable, although biometry tends to connote a biological (or even
agricultural), rather than medical, application.

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