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Always Learning
The data science field is always changing, which means that I'll always be learning.
Newsletters
2025
24 June, 2025 - Breaking through the noise with evidence
20 March, 2025 - Focus on HRDAG’s US-based projects
2024
10 December, 2024 - Witnessing Syria on Human Rights Day
29 November, 2024 - Giving thanks
20 November, 2024 - We are resolute
22 October, 2024 - Gaining insights into wrongful convictions
9 October, 2024 - A new tool for tracking police misconduct
18 September, 2024 - Evaluating gunshot detection technology
18 June, 2024 - A Pulitzer for an HRDAG partner
1 March, 2024 - Citations with impact
2023
21 December, 2023 - Evaluating tools to weed out discrimination
15 December, 2023 - ...
Documents of war: Understanding the Syrian Conflict
Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball. 2015. Significance 12, no. 2 (April): 14–19. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00811.x. © 2015 The Royal Statistical Society. All rights reserved. [online abstract]
HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2021
At HRDAG, 2021 was all about service and partnership.
HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2023
In 2023, HRDAG continued to learn from our partners about resilience and patience.
Criminality registration and measurement
Patrick Ball and Michael Reed Hurtado. 2016. El registro y la medición de la criminalidad. El problema de los datos faltantes y el uso de la ciencia para producir estimaciones en relación con el homicidio en Colombia, demostrado a partir de un ejemplo: el departamento de Antioquia (2003-2011). Revista Criminalidad, 58 (1): 9-23.
Patrick Ball and Michael Reed Hurtado. 2016. El registro y la medición de la criminalidad. El problema de los datos faltantes y el uso de la ciencia para producir estimaciones en relación con el homicidio en Colombia, demostrado a partir de un ejemplo: el departamento de Antioquia (2003-2011). Revista Criminalidad, 58 (1): 9-23. Criminality registration and measurement. The problem of missing data, and the use of science to produce estimations relating to homicide in Colombia, as demonstrated with an example from one of its administrative and political divisions: the Department of Antioquia (2003-2011).
Colombia (eng)
Text in English
Assessing Claims of Declining Lethal Violence
In March 2007, HRDAG published a study entitled "Assessing Claims of Declining Lethal Violence in Colombia." The authors of this report evaluated assertions that violence in Colombia declined after the demobilization of paramilitaries. They showed that these claims rest both on the overinterpretation of unadjusted data and on unsound causal inferences. The authors concluded that multiple data sources are needed to estimate the true rates of violence in Colombia after demobilization and they suggest avenues for further research.
This research paper is also available in Spanish at ...
Historic verdict in Guatemala—Gen.Efraín Ríos Montt found guilty
I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)
Guatemala CIIDH Data
Welcome to the web data resource for the International Center for Human Rights Research (Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos, or CIIDH). Here you will find raw data on human rights violations in Guatemala during the period 1960-1996. You're welcome to use it for your own statistical analyses.
ASCII delimited (csv)
Resource Information
Data Dictionary
Value Labels
File Structure (Variables)
These files are between 300-700 kilobytes. The data are stored in a zipped compression format.
For an explanation of how the data are structured and what the variables represent, see the data dictionary.
If you use ...
How Data Processing Uncovers Misconduct in Use of Force in Puerto Rico
In Puerto Rico, some people are more likely to be victims of police violence than others. HRDAG processed a flood of data to illuminate the racial bias.
When Data Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
This blog is a part of International Justice Monitor’s technology for truth series, which focuses on the use of technology for evidence and features views from key proponents in the field.
As highlighted by other posts in this series, emerging technology is increasing the amount and type of information available, in some contexts, to criminal and other investigations. Much of what is produced by these emerging technologies (Facebook posts, tweets, YouTube videos, text messages) falls in the category we refer to as “found” data. By “found” data we mean data not generated for a specific investigation, but instead, that is generated for ...
El Salvador
Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...
New Estimate Of Killings By Police Is Way Higher — And Still Too Low
Carl Bialik of 538 Politics interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball in an article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported. As Bialik writes, this is a math puzzle with real consequences.
That Higher Count Of Police Killings May Still Be 25 Percent Too Low.
Carl Bialik of 538 Politics reports on a new HRDAG study authored by Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball regarding the Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, which was issued a few weeks ago. As Bialik writes, the HRDAG scientists extrapolated from their work in five other countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Syria) to estimate that the BJS study missed approximately one quarter of the total number of killings by police.
Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count
In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.
A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations
In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think.
Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation.
Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...
CIIDH Data – Variables List
Version date: 2000.01.29
Current version: ATV20.1
Patrick Ball & Herbert F. Spirer
Below are listed the 19 files that constitute the CIIDH database. We have noted those that include data that might be analytically useful in future versions of ATV. File names and brief definitions are in bold, and variable summaries are in bulleted points.
CXTOV2 (Context; links to VLCNV2)
Additional detail on geographic location of case
Narrative summary
CXTOV2ex (Context extension; links to CXTOV2)
Fine breakdown on the age category & sex of anonymous victims
CXTOV2lg (Context extension; links to CXTOV2)
Legal procedures taken on behalf of the ...
HRDAG Offers New R Package – dga
Much of the work we do at HRDAG involves estimating the number of undocumented deaths using a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation (MSE, described in more detail here). One of our goals is to make this class of methods more broadly available to human rights researchers. In particular, we are finding that Bayesian approaches are extremely valuable for MSE. Accordingly, we are pleased to offer a new R package called dga (“decomposable graphs approach”) that performs Bayesian model averaging for MSE.
The main function in this package implements a model created by David Madigan and Jeremy York. This model was designed to ...
Patrick Ball Honored with Degree at Claremont Graduate University
We’re happy to announce that our executive director, Patrick Ball, has been presented an honorary degree from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. University President Deborah Freund presented the degree to Patrick at the university’s 88th annual commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 16, 2015. The degree conferred was Doctor of Science honoris causa.
“We at CGU are thrilled that Patrick Ball accepted our Honorary Degree invitation and joined us for commencement,” said Thomas Horan, CGU Professor and Director, Center for Information Systems and Technology. “Patrick’s work stands as a model for conducting first-r...