When working with documents in an archive, every document offers the opportunity for statistical study and quantitative research. But a document can also offer the discovery of a story. That is the case with the disappearance of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont, who was reported missing on June 6, 1983, at the age of 35.
Ana Lucrecia, a professor of psychology at the University of San Carlos, was scheduled to attend a meeting with Edgar Raúl Rivas Rodríguez at the Plaza Hotel in Guatemala’s capital city. Edgar, who also went missing, was a teacher at the School of Political Science at the University. (Ana Lucrecia’s case is explained more fully ...
Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India: A Preliminary Quantitative Analysis
Frequenty Asked Questions
If there is so much data available, why can't you make claims about the number of people killed by security forces during the Punjab counterinsurgency campaign?
Haven't Punjab Police and government bodies already documented the number of people killed and "illegally cremated?" Why doesn't this suffice?
What has been the impact of quantitative studies of human rights violations in other regions?
What impact do these findings have in the Punjab context? Why did you undertake this study?
What are the ...
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
Today the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report on their effort to document “all deaths that occur during the process of arrest in the United States.” The analysis estimates that the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program covers only 34-49% of these deaths. A parallel program by the FBI (the Supplementary Homicide Reports, SHR) is estimated to cover approximately the same proportion of deaths. Even taking into consideration both programs, 28% of all police homicides remain unreported.
In order to estimate the total number of homicides that appear on neither the ARD or ...
Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.
Las estimaciones se estratificaron por ubicación y perpetrador.
Kristian Lum’s work on the HRDAG Policing Project is referred to here: “In fact, Lum argues, it’s not clear how well this model worked at depicting the situation in Oakland. Those data on drug crimes were biased, she now reports. The problem was not deliberate, she says. Rather, data collectors just missed some criminals and crime sites. So data on them never made it into her model.”
Statisticien, Patrick Ball est à la barre ce vendredi matin. L’expert est entendu sur le taux de mortalité dans les centres de détention au Tchad sous Habré. Désigné par la chambre d’accusation, il dira avoir axé ses travaux sur des témoignages, des données venant des victimes et des documents de la DDS (Direction de la Documentation et de la Sécurité).
James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed
James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed
Multiple Systems Estimation
What is MSE?
What do you mean by statistical inference?
What is an overlap, and how do we know when lists overlap?
How does MSE find the total number of violations?
How was MSE originally developed?
How does the Benetech Human Rights Program use MSE?
1. What is MSE?
A: Multiple Systems Estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations.
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2. What do you mean by statistical inference?
A: ...
The files linked on this page contain the data used in the calculations presented in Benetech's report to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission entitled "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In accordance with Benetech's Memorandum of Understanding with the TRC, these data are published on the Internet so that others can use the material to replicate our findings and continue research on past human rights violations in Liberia. In order to protect the privacy of the people who suffered, the information in the files below contains no personal identifying information about the victims or ...
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
In early March, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a report that estimated that in the period 2003-2009 and 2011, there were approximately 7427 homicides committed by police in the US. We responded that the method the analysts used, capture-recapture with two databases, is vulnerable to underestimation if the databases exhibit positive dependence. We conduct a thorough sensitivity analysis on the original independence model as applied to the police homicides databases. We used information from several other countries where our partners created multiple databases of homicides. We ...
But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.
“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”
We’ve
built a model for estimating the true number of positives, using what we have determined to be the most reliable datasets—deaths.
Last month Significance magazine published an article on the topic of predictive policing and police bias, which I co-authored with William Isaac. Since then, we've published a blogpost about it and fielded a few recurring questions. Here they are, along with our responses.
Do your findings still apply given that PredPol uses crime reports rather than arrests as training data?
Because this article was meant for an audience that is not necessarily well-versed in criminal justice data and we were under a strict word limit, we simplified language in describing the data. The data we used is a version of the Oakland Police Department’s crime report...
The data on killings in Kosovo are in four files. All of the files are comma-delimited ASCII. The fields in each file are described below.
If you use these data on Kosovo killings, please cite them with the following citation, as well as this note:
“These are convenience sample data, and as such they are not a statistically representative sample of events in this conflict. These data do not support conclusions about patterns, trends, or other substantive comparisons (such as over time, space, ethnicity, age, etc.).”
Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. (2002). AAAS/ABA-CEELI/Human Rights Data ...
Huffington Post Politics writer Matt Easton interviews Patrick Ball, executive director of HRDAG, about the latest enumeration of killings in Syria. As selection bias is increasing, it becomes harder to see it: we have the “appearance of perfect knowledge, when in fact the shape of that knowledge has not changed that much,” says Patrick. “Technology is not a substitute for science.”
The Columbia Journalism Review investigates the casualty count in Iraq, more than a decade after the U.S. invasion. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted. “IBC is very good at covering the bombs that go off in markets,” said Patrick Ball, an analyst at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group who says his whole career is to study “people being killed.” But quiet assassinations and military skirmishes away from the capital often receive little or no media attention.
The tension started in the witness room. “You could feel the stress rolling off the walls in there,” Patrick Ball remembers. “I can remember realizing that this is why lawyers wear sport coats – you can’t see all the sweat on their arms and back.” He was, you could say, a little nervous to be cross-examined by Slobodan Milosevic.
