The course objective is as follows:To provide students with the knowledge, theory, and methodological skills for analyzing and interpreting the spatial patterns of various diseases in order to elucidate underlying exposure processes giving rise to the observed patterns. The students referred to are expected to have a special interest in Public Health, and recruitment for this new course especially targets students in the School of Public Health. This includes especially students from the departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, at both the PhD level and the Masters level. Students are expected to have had introductory probability theory and to have some basic knowledge of biostatistics.
Another objective is to exercise certain BioMedware software products, including one established product (Stat! [6]), a product soon to be released (Gamma [2]), and especially the new software designed for this project (which we call GeoMed [5]). This last piece of software will serve as the keystone for much of the spatial statistical analysis we do in our course in the future. Several computer labs have been structured around these pieces of software, each of which is designed for performing spatial statistical tests. The course allows us to both alpha/beta test the software, and to generate insight from the students about ways in which the software can be improved.