Dictionary
The Dictionary provides concise definitions of health economics terms, arranged alphabetically for quick reference. Use it to understand unfamiliar terminology or confirm the meaning of a specific term.
D
- Descriptive Statistics
- A branch of statistics concerned with summarising a dataset's basic features, such as central tendency and dispersion, without drawing inferences about a broader population.
- Dispersion
- A statistical concept describing how spread out or clustered values in a dataset are, commonly measured using variance, standard deviation, or interquartile range.
I
- Interquartile Range
- A dispersion measure calculated as the difference between the seventy-fifth and twenty-fifth percentiles, the range containing the middle half of observations.
N
- Negative Binomial
- A discrete probability distribution modelling count data with more variability than a Poisson distribution would predict, known as overdispersion.
- Negative Binomial Regression
- A modelling technique analysing count outcome data, such as hospitalisations, that shows overdispersion relative to what a Poisson model would assume.
R
- Range
- A dispersion measure calculated as the difference between the maximum and minimum values in a dataset, sensitive to extreme outliers.
S
- Standard Deviation
- A dispersion measure representing the average distance of data points from the mean, calculated as the square root of the variance.
V
- Variance
- A dispersion measure representing the average squared deviation of individual data points from the mean of a dataset.