Peter Baker

Biography

He holds a position as a Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics at the School of Public Health and as a senior statistical collaborator, advisor and consultant to several research projects in the Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health and the Queensland Clinical Trials and Biostatistics Centre. With thirty years experience as a statistical consultant and researcher, Peter has a passion for biostatistics applied to public health and medical research. He also champions reproducible research and reporting and to this end has developed R and Make software to aid the workflow of data analysts in any field. As a statistical consultant and collaborator, he has contributed to many research projects. His contribution has ranged from advice on standard statistical approaches to the application of novel methods to improve statistical analysis or the development of new statistical methodology to fill a gap in the knowledge.

Research Interest

efficient statistical computing using R and related software for the workflow of data analysis, reproducible research and reporting using R, markdown and sweave, tailoring R functions and developing bespoke packages for specific statistical analyses, and applied statistlcal research in novel methods for epidemiological and medial research, including graphical models for multivariate data in epidemiology, statistical methods for modelling trajectories of alcohol consumption in youths, propensity score analysis to adjust for selection bias in observational studies, investigating the appropriateness of statistical methods (seasonal ARIMA and ZIP models) for assessing policy interventions in seasonal time series data including application to the Queensland Government Drink Safe Precincts study with the Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research (CSYAR), and Bayesian methods, including MCMC and ABC, for epidemiological and medical MCMC studies.