OpenEpi is a free, web-based, open source, operating system-independent series of programs for use in

epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and Risk factor (epidemiology), determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population, and application of this knowledge to prevent dise ...

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) is a branch of statistics that applies statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experimen ...

public health Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the de ...

, and

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

, providing a number of epidemiologic and statistical tools for summary data. OpenEpi was developed in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

and

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, and can be run in modern

web browsers A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scree ...

. The program can be run from the OpenEpi website or downloaded and run without a web connection. The source code and documentation is downloadable and freely available for use by other investigators. OpenEpi has been reviewed, both by media organizations and in research journals. The OpenEpi developers have had extensive experience in the development and testing of

Epi Info Epi Info is statistical software for epidemiology developed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia (US). Epi Info has been in existence for over 20 years and is currently available for Microsoft Windows, Androi ...

, a program developed by the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the National public health institutes, national public health agency of the United States. It is a Federal agencies of the United States, United States federal agency under the United S ...

(CDC) and widely used around the world for data entry and analysis. OpenEpi was developed to perform analyses found in the

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

version of

modules StatCalc and EpiTable, to improve upon the types of analyses provided by these modules, and to provide a number of tools and calculations not currently available in Epi Info. It is the first step toward an entirely web-based set of epidemiologic software tools. OpenEpi can be thought of as an important companion to

and to other programs such as SAS,

PSPP PSPP is a free software application for analysis of sampled data, intended as a free alternative for IBM SPSS Statistics. It has a graphical user interface and conventional command-line interface. It is written in C and uses GNU Scientific L ...

SPSS SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Versi ...

Stata Stata (, , alternatively , occasionally stylized as STATA) is a general-purpose Statistics, statistical software package developed by StataCorp for data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and automated reporting. It is used by researchers ...

, SYSTAT, Minitab, Epidata, and R (see the

R programming language R is a programming language for statistical computing and data visualization. It has been widely adopted in the fields of data mining, bioinformatics, data analysis, and data science. The core R language is extended by a large number of so ...

). Another functionally similar Windows-based program is Winpepi. See also

list of statistical packages The following is a list of statistical software. Open-source * ADaMSoft – a generalized statistical software with data mining algorithms and methods for data management * ADMB – a software suite for non-linear statistical modeling based on C+ ...

and

comparison of statistical packages The following tables compare general and technical information for many statistical analysis software packages. General information Operating system support ANOVA Support for various ANOVA methods Regression Support for various regression ...

. Both OpenEpi and

were developed with the goal of providing tools for low and moderate resource areas of the world. The initial development of OpenEpi was supported by a grant from the

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation The Gates Foundation is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was launched in 2000 and is reported to be List of wealthiest charitable foundations, the third largest char ...

Emory University Emory University is a private university, private research university in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in 1836 as Emory College by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. Its main campu ...

Types

The types of calculations currently performed by OpenEpi include: * Various confidence intervals for proportions, rates,

standardized mortality ratio In epidemiology, the standardized mortality ratio or SMR, is a quantity, expressed as either a ratio or percentage quantifying the increase or decrease in mortality of a study cohort with respect to the general population. Standardized mortality ...

mean A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statist ...

median The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a Sample (statistics), data sample, a statistical population, population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “ ...

percentiles In statistics, a ''k''-th percentile, also known as percentile score or centile, is a score (e.g., a data point) a given percentage ''k'' of all scores in its frequency distribution exists ("exclusive" definition) or a score a given percentage ...

* 2x2 crude and stratified tables for count and rate data * Matched case-control analysis * Test for trend with

count data Count (feminine: countess) is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, varying in relative status, generally of middling rank in the hierarchy of nobility. Pine, L. G. ''Titles: How the King Became His Majesty''. New York: ...

* Independent t-test and one-way

ANOVA Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a family of statistical methods used to compare the means of two or more groups by analyzing variance. Specifically, ANOVA compares the amount of variation ''between'' the group means to the amount of variation ''w ...

* Diagnostic and

screening test In medicine, screening is a strategy used to look for as-yet-unrecognised conditions or risk markers. This testing can be applied to individuals or to a whole population without symptoms or signs of the disease being screened. Screening interv ...

analyses with

receiver operating characteristic A receiver operating characteristic curve, or ROC curve, is a graph of a function, graphical plot that illustrates the performance of a binary classifier model (can be used for multi class classification as well) at varying threshold values. ROC ...

(ROC) curves *

Sample size Sample size determination or estimation is the act of choosing the number of observations or replicates to include in a statistical sample. The sample size is an important feature of any empirical study in which the goal is to make inferences abo ...

for proportions,

cross-sectional In statistics and econometrics, cross-sectional data is a type of data collected by observing many subjects (such as individuals, firms, countries, or regions) at a single point or period of time. Analysis of cross-sectional data usually consists ...

surveys, unmatched case-control,

cohort Cohort or cohortes may refer to: Cohort Sociological * Cohort (military unit), the basic tactical unit of a Roman legion * Cohort (educational group), a group of students working together through the same academic curriculum Scientific * Cohort ...

randomized controlled trial A randomized controlled trial (or randomized control trial; RCT) is a form of scientific experiment used to control factors not under direct experimental control. Examples of RCTs are clinical trials that compare the effects of drugs, surgical ...

s, and comparison of two means * Power calculations for proportions (unmatched case-control,

randomized controlled trials A randomized controlled trial (or randomized control trial; RCT) is a form of scientific experiment used to control factors not under direct experimental control. Examples of RCTs are clinical trials that compare the effects of drugs, surgical ...

) and for the comparison of two means * Random number generator For epidemiologists and other health researchers, OpenEpi performs a number of calculations based on tables not found in most epidemiologic and statistical packages. For example, for a single 2x2 table, in addition to the results presented in other programs, OpenEpi provides estimates for: * Etiologic or prevented fraction in the population and in exposed with confidence intervals, based on risk, odds, or rate data * The cross-product and MLE

odds ratio An odds ratio (OR) is a statistic that quantifies the strength of the association between two events, A and B. The odds ratio is defined as the ratio of the odds of event A taking place in the presence of B, and the odds of A in the absence of B ...

estimate * Mid-p exact p-values and confidence limits for the

* Calculations of rate ratios and rate differences with confidence intervals and statistical tests. For

stratified Stratification may refer to: Mathematics * Stratification (mathematics), any consistent assignment of numbers to predicate symbols * Data stratification in statistics Earth sciences * Stable and unstable stratification * Stratification, or st ...

2x2 tables with count data, OpenEpi provides: * Mantel-Haenszel (MH) and precision-based estimates of the risk ratio and odds ratio * Precision-based adjusted risk difference * Tests for interaction for the

risk ratio The relative risk (RR) or risk ratio is the ratio of the probability of an outcome in an exposed group to the probability of an outcome in an unexposed group. Together with risk difference and odds ratio, relative risk measures the association bet ...

, and risk difference * Four different confidence limit methods for the odds ratio. Similar to Epi Info, in a stratified analysis, both crude and adjusted estimates are provided so that the assessment of

confounding In causal inference, a confounder is a variable that influences both the dependent variable and independent variable, causing a spurious association. Confounding is a causal concept, and as such, cannot be described in terms of correlatio ...

can be made. With rate data, OpenEpi provides adjusted rate ratio's and rate differences, and tests for interaction. Finally, with count data, OpenEpi also performs a test for trend, for both crude data and stratified data. In addition to being used to analyze data by health researchers, OpenEpi has been used as a training tool for teaching epidemiology to students at:

University of Massachusetts The University of Massachusetts is the Public university, public university system of the Massachusetts, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The university system includes six campuses (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell ...

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

Morehouse College Morehouse College is a Private college, private, Historically black colleges and universities, historically black, Men's colleges in the United States, men's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia, ...

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the List of oldest schools in California, oldest public university on the West Coast of ...

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) was a state-run health sciences institution with six locations in New Jersey. It was founded as the Seton Hall College of Medicine and Dentistry in 1954, and by the 1980s was both a ...

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

, and elsewhere. This includes campus-based and distance learning courses. Because OpenEpi is easy to use, requires no programming experience, and can be run on the internet, students can use the program and focus on the interpretation of results. Users can run the program in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian. Comments and suggestions for improvements are welcomed and the developers respond to user queries. The developers encourage others to develop modules that could be added to OpenEpi and provide a developer's tool at the website. Planned future development include improvements to existing modules, development of new modules, translation into other languages, and add the ability to cut and paste data and/or read data files.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Openepi Biostatistics Epidemiology Free statistical software Software using the MIT license