Statistician role is diluted by statistical programmer because of industry need ?
Venkatesan Mudaliar
| Biostatistics | | Statistical Programming | | Data Standardization | | Data Management | |Clinical Data Consulting | |Portfolio optimization | |Decision-making | |Bayesian analysis | |Operational strategy.|
Statistics play a crucial role in clinical trials and in the drug development process – from trial design to protocol development. Having a fundamental understanding of statistical issues can uphold the integrity of a clinical trial and improve communication between clinicians and statisticians.
Bio-statistics are involved in every step of clinical research including trial design, protocol development, and data management and monitoring, data analysis and clinical trial reporting. A Harvard report on clinical research demonstrated evidence that suggests that researchers often misinterpret statistical methods due to poor knowledge of statistical concepts.
Statisticians and clinical operations personnel must always communicate in order to ensure successful trial design and analyses. A factor that can often hamper effective communication is complicated statistical terminology. Since statisticians can specialize in study designs (even complex designs like Adaptive Trial Design), therapeutic areas and statistical methods, it is crucial that the rest of the study team understands the statistical strategy proposed by the biostatistician.
In the current industry statistical programmer does review of above said and create program to generate the output or report so that viewer can see the behavior of the data. Statistical programmer can also be interested to the key statistical details (as to what statistics produces what output) but he is not authorized to make a calls on which statistical method to use (Cochran vs Cochran Matzel vs CochranMH ).
Due to huge requirement of programming for creating outputs and the reports lot of statistician are made to work as statistical programmer which resultant into dilution of statistical knowledge on the long run.
This is what I felt in my 9 years of career and I am keeping this questions open, that
“Whether the role of statistician is slowly getting diluted in the industry?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advisor - Data Science based Healthcare Transformation at Ingine Inc
8yI think both are making the same point; in a way bringing more credibility to statistics as a discipline and statistician as a core skill far removed than than programmers.
Global Biostats Advocate 🔸️ Founder @PHARMA-STATS🔸️Pharma-Ratna Award-Winning Statistician 🔸️ Women Entrepreneurs Awardee - Lions Club 🔸️ HBA Volunteer Week Honoree 🔸️ JITO Member🔸️ Passionate Statistical Trainer
8yRespect your feelings. But I am sorry not agree with your point. Generally Statisticians choose programming area based on fastest job requirements or personal interest in programming. Nowadays many SAS programmers not belong to statistical background. Hence, considering background of all SAS programmers, their statistical qualification & knowledge research company definitely can not give authorization to make a call on which statistical method to use.