ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some essential statistical concepts that will allow the reader to appreciate statistical methods used in economic evaluation. Economic evaluation relies heavily on the use of statistical and clinical trial-related methodology to quantify and present cost-effectiveness analyses. In economic evaluation, the mean is the choice of statistic despite the median survival time often being cited as a measure of effect size. The statistical methods underlying economic evaluation in cancer broadly consist of appreciating the distribution of data, presenting data using summary measures, understanding survival analyses methods, modeling, and simulation. Cancer registries increasingly collect important prognostic factors of survival useful for oncologists, policymakers, and others in order to make decisions on expected survival rates for subgroups of patients. The statistical measures used to determine uncertainty around cost-effectiveness decisions will take the form of traditional statistical quantities determined from simple to more complicated analyses.
